PLoS Biology
March 1, 2026
Adriana Michalak, Davide Marzoli, Francesco Pietrogiacomi et al.
Perceived sleep depth is a key determinant of subjective sleep quality, traditionally thought to reflect unconsciousness and reduced cortical activation. Here, we combined high-density EEG with a serial awakening paradigm during NREM2 (N2) sleep in healthy human participants to examine its neural and experiential correlates. As expected, deeper sleep was associated with reduced cortical...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
September 8, 2025
Adriana Michalak, Davide Marzoli, Francesco Pietrogiacomi et al.
preprint
Perceived sleep depth is a key determinant of subjective sleep quality, traditionally thought to reflect unconsciousness and reduced cortical activation. Here, we combined high-density EEG with a serial awakening paradigm during NREM sleep to examine its neural and experiential correlates. As expected, deeper sleep was associated with reduced cortical activation, reflected in a lower...
Scientific Reports
April 20, 2022
Francesco Bossi, Francesca Zaninotto, Sonia D'Arcangelo et al.
Mindfulness interventions were shown to be effective in improving well-being and reducing perceived stress in several conditions. These effects were also found in online mindfulness-based training, especially in employees in organizational environments. The aim of this study was to test the effectiveness of an online mindfulness intervention on healthy employees, especially after the first...
Sleep
May 14, 2021
Laura Sophie Imperatori, Jacinthe Cataldi, Monica Betta et al.
30 citations
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...
Brain and Cognition
January 13, 2020
Giulia Avvenuti, Andrea Leo, Luca Cecchetti et al.
Transcendental Meditation (TM) is defined as a mental process of transcending using a silent mantra. Previous work showed that relatively brief period of TM practice leads to decreases in stress and anxiety. However, whether these changes are subserved by specific morpho-functional brain modifications (as observed in other meditation techniques) is still unclear. Using a longitudinal design, we...
Scientific Reports
June 20, 2019
Laura Sophie Imperatori, Monica Betta, Luca Cecchetti et al.
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...
Frontiers in Psychology
2011
Ron Kupers, Pietro Pietrini, Emiliano Ricciardi et al.
139 citations
Vision plays a central role in how we represent and interact with the world around us. The primacy of vision is structurally imbedded in cortical organization as about one-third of the cortical surface in primates is involved in visual processes. Consequently, the loss of vision, either at birth or later in life, affects brain organization and the way the world is perceived and acted upon. In...
Daniele Gatti, Tomaso Vecchi, Pietro Pietrini et al.
preprint
Dreams provide a potential unique window into human cognition, yet it remains unclear whether dream content reflects structured representational organization or largely idiosyncratic expression. Here, we analyze a large-scale dataset of dream narratives (21,607 reports) using a transformer language model to construct a high-dimensional representational space of dreams, in which each report is...