Research on the neural basis of consciousness has largely focused either on where and when neural activity represents conscious contents, or on the interactions through which distributed neural populations become integrated. We argue that these approaches can be connected by analysing information relations among neural representations. A perceptual content can be synergistic when it is carried...
Pure awareness (PA) has been proposed as a form of minimal phenomenal experience, but its neurophenomenological signatures remain poorly characterized. Transcendental meditation (TM) offers a particularly tractable empirical model of PA because its procedure is standardized, its induction is effortless, and it reliably elicits reports of awareness with minimal content. We combined...
During sleep, the human brain transitions to a "sentinel processing mode," enabling the continued processing of environmental stimuli despite the absence of consciousness. We employed advanced information-theoretic analyses, including mutual information (MI) and co-information (co-I), alongside event-related potential (ERP) and temporal generalization analyses (TGA), to characterize auditory...
We present a neurophenomenological case study investigating distinct neural connectivity regimes during an advanced concentrative absorption meditation called jhana (ACAM-J), characterized by highly stable attention and mental absorption. Using EEG recordings and phenomenological ratings (29 sessions) from a meditator with +20,000 hr of practice, we evaluated connectivity metrics tracking...
Breathwork is an understudied school of practices involving intentional respiratory modulation to induce an altered state of consciousness (ASC). We simultaneously investigate the phenomenological and neural dynamics of breathwork by combining Temporal Experience Tracing, a quantitative methodology that preserves the temporal dynamics of subjective experience, with low-density portable EEG...
Subjective experiences are hard to capture quantitatively without losing depth and nuance, and subjective report analyses are time-consuming, their interpretation contested. We describe Temporal Experience Tracing, a method that captures relevant aspects of the unified conscious experience over a continuous period of time. The continuous multidimensional description of an experience allows us...
There is increasing evidence that the level of consciousness can be captured by neural informational complexity: for instance, complexity, as measured by the Lempel Ziv (LZ) compression algorithm, decreases during anaesthesia and non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep in humans and rats, when compared with LZ in awake and REM sleep. In contrast, LZ is higher in humans under the effect of...
The contents of consciousness are complex and dynamic and are embedded in perception and cognition. The study of consciousness and subjective experience has been central to philosophy for centuries. However, despite its relevance for understanding cognition and behaviour, the empirical study of consciousness is relatively new, embroiled by the seemingly opposing subjective and objective sources...
At any given moment, we experience a perceptual scene as a single whole and yet we may distinguish a variety of objects within it. This phenomenon instantiates two properties of conscious perception: integration and differentiation. Integration is the property of experiencing a collection of objects as a unitary percept and differentiation is the property of experiencing these objects as...
The weighted Phase Lag Index (wPLI) and the weighted Symbolic Mutual Information (wSMI) represent two robust and widely used methods for MEG/EEG functional connectivity estimation. Interestingly, both methods have been shown to detect relative alterations of brain functional connectivity in conditions associated with changes in the level of consciousness, such as following severe brain injury...
ABSTRACT Mapping the reports of awareness and its neural underpinnings is instrumental to understand the limits of human perception. The capacity to become aware of objects in the world may be studied by suppressing faint target stimuli with strong masking stimuli, or – alternatively – by manipulating the level of wakefulness from full alertness to mild drowsiness. By combining these two...
In the study of consciousness, neurophenomenology was originally established as a novel research program attempting to reconcile two apparently irreconcilable methodologies in psychology: qualitative and quantitative methods. Its potential relies on Francisco Varela's idea of reciprocal constraints, in which first-person accounts and neurophysiological data mutually inform each other. However,...
The transition from a relaxed to a drowsy state of mind is often accompanied by hypnagogic experiences: most commonly, perceptual imagery, but also linguistic intrusions, i.e., the sudden emergence of unpredictable anomalies in the stream of inner speech. This study has sought to describe the contents of such intrusions, to verify their association with the progression of sleep onset, and to...
Theoretical advances in the science of consciousness have proposed that it is concomitant with balanced cortical integration and differentiation, enabled by efficient networks of information transfer across multiple scales. Here, we apply graph theory to compare key signatures of such networks in high-density electroencephalographic data from 32 patients with chronic disorders of consciousness,...
Interoception refers to the conscious perception of body signals. Mindfulness is a meditation practice that encourages individuals to focus on their internal experiences such as bodily sensations, thoughts, and emotions. In this study, we selected a behavioral measure of interoceptive sensitivity (heartbeat detection task, HBD) to compare the effect of meditation practice on interoceptive...
Abstract A neuroanatomical model of urge-for-action phenomena has been proposed based on the "motivation-for-action" network (e.g., insula and mid-cingulate cortex). Notwithstanding the sound evidence presented regarding the functional and anatomical correlates of this model, the nature of the relationship between urges and conscious awareness remains to be addressed. Moreover, this model does...