The brain continuously integrates information from the external environment (exteroception) and the internal bodily milieu (interoception). However, how the balance between these two processing streams shifts across vigilance states with differing levels of environmental responsiveness remains poorly understood. Here, we examined neural responses to external auditory and internal cardiac...
Reliably detecting consciousness in unresponsive patients remains an urgent ethical and clinical challenge, as no behavior-independent marker is currently accepted in clinical practice. We characterize consciousness as linked to a representation of the embodied subject of experience, mediated by multisensory integration within the peripersonal space (PPS) system. We test whether a neural marker...
Abstract The brain continuously integrates information from the external environment (exteroception) and the internal bodily milieu (interoception). How the balance between these two processing streams shifts across vigilance states with differing levels of environmental responsiveness, however, remains poorly understood. Here, we examined neural responses to external auditory and internal...
Sleepwalking and related parasomnias result from incomplete awakenings out of non-rapid eye movement sleep. Behavioral episodes can occur without consciousness or recollection, or in relation to dream-like experiences. To understand what accounts for these differences in consciousness and recall, here we recorded parasomnia episodes with high-density electroencephalography (EEG) and interviewed...
What accounts for feeling deeply asleep? Standard sleep recordings only incompletely reflect subjective aspects of sleep and some individuals with so-called sleep misperception frequently feel awake although sleep recordings indicate clear-cut sleep. To identify the determinants of sleep perception, we performed 787 awakenings in 20 good sleepers and 10 individuals with sleep misperception and...
Functional connectivity (FC) metrics describe brain inter-regional interactions and may complement information provided by common power-based analyses. Here, we investigated whether the FC-metrics weighted Phase Lag Index (wPLI) and weighted Symbolic Mutual Information (wSMI) may unveil functional differences across four stages of vigilance-wakefulness (W), NREM-N2, NREM-N3, and REM sleep-with...
Dreaming can occur in both rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM (NREM) sleep. We recently showed that in both REM and NREM sleep, dreaming is associated with local decreases in slow wave activity (SWA) in posterior brain regions. To expand these findings, here we asked how specific features of slow waves and spindles, the hallmarks of NREM sleep, relate to dream experiences. Fourteen healthy...