bioRxiv Preprint Server
June 7, 2026
Andrea I. Luppi, Dragana Manasova, Justine Y. Hansen et al.
preprint
Consciousness and cognition arise from the ongoing interactions between brain regions. Synchronous fluctuations of fMRI signals may indicate that two brain regions perform similar cognitive functions, but neural interactions are also constrained by anatomical connectivity and regions’ molecular, cytoarchitectonic, and metabolic profiles. Here we disentangle the respective contributions of...
Advanced Science
November 20, 2025
Paolo Cardone, Charlotte Martial, Yonatan Sanz Perl et al.
3 citations
Abstract Disorders of consciousness (DoC), including unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS) and minimally conscious state (MCS), have limited treatment options and are characterized by low complexity of brain activity. Recent research suggests that psychedelic drugs, which enhance the complexity of brain activity, could offer promising therapies. Here, individualized whole‐brain computational...
Nature reviews. Neurology
June 1, 2025
Charlotte Martial, Pauline Fritz, Olivia Gosseries et al.
19 citations
Near-death experiences (NDEs) are episodes of disconnected consciousness that typically occur in situations that involve an actual or potential physical threat or are perceived as such, and the experiences are characterized by a rich content with prototypical mystical features. Several explanatory theories for NDEs have been proposed, ranging from psychological or neurophysiological to...
British Journal of Anaesthesia
April 1, 2025
Milan Van Maldegem, Jakub Vohryzek, Selen Atasoy et al.
3 citations
Ketamine, in doses suitable to induce anaesthesia in humans, gives rise to a unique state of unresponsiveness accompanied by vivid experiences and sensations, making it possible to disentangle the correlated but distinct concepts of conscious awareness and behavioural responsiveness. This distinction is often overlooked in the study of consciousness. The mathematical framework of connectome...
OBM Integrative and Complementary Medicine
March 5, 2025
Gaëtan Collignon, Aminata Bicego, Marie-Elisabeth Faymonville et al.
2 citations
Auto-induced cognitive trance (AICT) is a method for voluntarily entering modified state of consciousness. The therapeutic implications of AICT are still unknown. Since complementary approaches based on modified states of consciousness are recognized to be beneficial for patients suffering from chronic pain (e.g., hypnosis, meditation), we here present the first case report of a 68-year-old man...
iScience
January 17, 2025
Paolo Cardone, Arthur Bonhomme, Vincent Bonhomme et al.
9 citations
Post-comatose disorders of consciousness (DoC) represent persistent neurological conditions with limited therapeutic options and a poor prognosis. Recent works advocate for exploring the effects of psychedelics to enhance brain complexity in DoC and ameliorate their consciousness. We investigated sub-anesthetic concentration of the atypical psychedelic ketamine for treating post-comatose...
Neuromethods
2025
Naji Alnagger, Paolo Cardone, Javier Montupil et al.
AbstractKetamine is a versatile N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA)-antagonist used in various clinical settings. Ketamine dose-dependently induces psychoactive effects: at low, anti-hyperalgesic doses, these are minor or not detectable, but at subanesthetic doses, they may include dissociative, psychotomimetic, and psychedelic events. At an anesthetic dose, ketamine leads to a state of “(full)...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
June 25, 2024
Milan Van Maldegem, Jakub Vohryzek, Selen Atasoy et al.
2 citations
preprint
Abstract Ketamine is classified as a dissociative anaesthetic that, in sub-anaesthetic doses, can produce an altered state of consciousness characterised by dissociative symptoms, visual and auditory hallucinations, and perceptual distortions. Given the anaesthetic-like and psychedelic-like nature of this compound, it is expected to have different effects on brain dynamics in anaesthetic doses...
Frontiers in Neuroscience
February 13, 2024
Benedetta Cecconi, Javier Montupil, Sepehr Mortaheb et al.
6 citations
Background: Disconnected consciousness describes a state in which subjective experience (i.e., consciousness) becomes isolated from the external world. It appears frequently during sleep or sedation, when subjective experiences remain vivid but are unaffected by external stimuli. Traditional methods of differentiating connected and disconnected consciousness, such as relying on behavioral...
The International journal of clinical and experimental hypnosis
2024
Mélanie Louras, Audrey Vanhaudenhuyse, Rajanikant Panda et al.
8 citations
When used separately, virtual reality (VR) and mind-body therapies (MBTs) have the potential to reduce pain across various acute and chronic conditions. While their combination is increasingly used, no study offers a consolidated presentation of VR and MBTs. This study aims to propose an overview of the effectiveness of VR combined with MBTs (i.e., meditation, mindfulness, relaxation, and...
BJA Open
September 26, 2023
Javier Montupil, Paolo Cardone, Cécile Staquet et al.
32 citations
Neuroscientists agree on the value of locating the source of consciousness within the brain. Anaesthesiologists are no exception, and have their own operational definition of consciousness based on phenomenological observations during anaesthesia. The full functional correlates of consciousness are yet to be precisely identified, however rapidly evolving progress in this scientific domain has...
Science Advances
June 14, 2023
Leor Roseman, Christopher Timmermann, Daniel Golkowski et al.
65 citations
To understand how pharmacological interventions can exert their powerful effects on brain function, we need to understand how they engage the brain’s rich neurotransmitter landscape. Here, we bridge microscale molecular chemoarchitecture and pharmacologically induced macroscale functional reorganization, by relating the regional distribution of 19 neurotransmitter receptors and transporters...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
September 28, 2022
Yonatan Sanz Perl, Carla Pallavicini, Juan Piccinini et al.
preprint
Brain states are frequently represented using a unidimensional scale measuring the richness of subjective experience (level of consciousness). This description assumes a mapping between the high-dimensional space of whole-brain configurations and the trajectories of brain states associated with changes in consciousness, yet this mapping and its properties remain unknown. We combined whole-brain...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
July 13, 2022
Andrea I. Luppi, Justine Y. Hansen, Ram Adapa et al.
5 citations
preprint
Abstract To understand how pharmacological interventions can exert their powerful effects on brain function, we need to understand how they engage the brain’s rich neurotransmitter landscape. Here, we bridge microscale molecular chemoarchitecture and pharmacologically-induced macroscale functional reorganisation, by relating the regional distribution of 19 neurotransmitter receptors and...
Nature Communications
February 25, 2022
Minji Lee, Leandro R. D. Sanz, Alice Barra et al.
120 citations
Consciousness can be defined by two components: arousal (wakefulness) and awareness (subjective experience). However, neurophysiological consciousness metrics able to disentangle between these components have not been reported. Here, we propose an explainable consciousness indicator (ECI) using deep learning to disentangle the components of consciousness. We employ electroencephalographic (EEG)...
Chaos An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science
September 1, 2021
Sofía Morena del Pozo, Helmut Laufs, Vincent Bonhomme et al.
13 citations
The dynamic core hypothesis posits that consciousness is correlated with simultaneously integrated and differentiated assemblies of transiently synchronized brain regions. We represented time-dependent functional interactions using dynamic brain networks and assessed the integrity of the dynamic core by means of the size and flexibility of the largest multilayer module. As a first step, we...
Neuroimage
February 9, 2021
Riku Ihalainen, Olivia Gosseries, Frederik van de Steen et al.
30 citations
In recent years, specific cortical networks have been proposed to be crucial for sustaining consciousness, including the posterior hot zone and frontoparietal resting state networks (RSN). Here, we computationally evaluate the relative contributions of three RSNs - the default mode network (DMN), the salience network (SAL), and the central executive network (CEN) - to consciousness and its loss...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
July 2, 2020
Yonatan Sanz Perl, Carla Pallavicini, Ignacio Perez-Ipina et al.
preprint
Consciousness transiently fades away during deep sleep, more stably under anesthesia, and sometimes permanently due to brain injury. The development of an index to quantify the level of consciousness across these different states is regarded as a key problem both in basic and clinical neuroscience. We argue that this problem is ill-defined since such an index would not exhaust all the relevant...
arXiv Preprint Archive
February 6, 2020
Marco Alberto Javarone, Olivia Gosseries, Daniele Marinazzo et al.
We introduce a mean-field model for analysing the dynamics of human consciousness. In particular, inspired by the Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory and by the Max Tegmark's representation of consciousness, we study order-disorder phase transitions on Curie-Weiss models generated by processing EEG signals. The latter have been recorded on healthy individuals undergoing deep sedation....
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
August 14, 2019
Vincent Bonhomme, Cécile Staquet, Javier Montupil et al.
109 citations
General anesthesia reversibly alters consciousness, without shutting down the brain globally. Depending on the anesthetic agent and dose, it may produce different consciousness states including a complete absence of subjective experience (unconsciousness), a conscious experience without perception of the environment (disconnected consciousness, like during dreaming), or episodes of oriented...
Functional MRI
December 1, 2018
Nasim Mortazavi, Cécile Staquet, Audrey Vanhaudenhuyse et al.
This chapter reviews current knowledge of the effects of hypnotic anesthetic agents on brain resting-state networks (RSNs) that sustain consciousness. Although full exploration of the networks under anesthesia is not yet available, current evidence indicates that anesthetic agents with hypnotic properties dose-dependently modulate RSN functioning. Each anesthetic agent has specific effects that...
Scientific Reports
November 5, 2018
Matthieu Darracq, Chadd M. Funk, Daniel Polyakov et al.
49 citations
Sleep and anesthesia entail alterations in conscious experience. Conscious experience may be absent (unconsciousness) or take the form of dreaming, a state in which sensory stimuli are not incorporated into conscious experience (disconnected consciousness). Recent work has identified features of cortical activity that distinguish conscious from unconscious states; however, less is known about...
Anesthesiology
August 9, 2016
Vincent Bonhomme, Audrey Vanhaudenhuyse, Athena Demertzi et al.
206 citations
BACKGROUND: Consciousness-altering anesthetic agents disturb connectivity between brain regions composing the resting-state consciousness networks (RSNs). The default mode network (DMn), executive control network, salience network (SALn), auditory network, sensorimotor network (SMn), and visual network sustain mentation. Ketamine modifies consciousness differently from other agents, producing...
Journal of The Royal Society Interface
2016
Enzo Tagliazucchi, Dante R. Chialvo, Michael Siniatchkin et al.
210 citations
Loss of cortical integration and changes in the dynamics of electrophysiological brain signals characterize the transition from wakefulness towards unconsciousness. In this study, we arrive at a basic model explaining these observations based on the theory of phase transitions in complex systems. We studied the link between spatial and temporal correlations of large-scale brain activity...
PLoS One
June 30, 2014
Enrico Amico, Francisco Gómez, Carol di Perri et al.
115 citations
BACKGROUND: Recent studies have been shown that functional connectivity of cerebral areas is not a static phenomenon, but exhibits spontaneous fluctuations over time. There is evidence that fluctuating connectivity is an intrinsic phenomenon of brain dynamics that persists during anesthesia. Lately, point process analysis applied on functional data has revealed that much of the information...