Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
May 1, 2023
Georg Northoff, Andrea Scalabrini, Stuart Fogel
13 citations
Dreams are one of the most bizarre and least understood states of consciousness. Bridging the gap between brain and phenomenology of (un)conscious experience, we propose the Topographic-dynamic Re-organization model of Dreams (TRoD). Topographically, dreams are characterized by a shift towards increased activity and connectivity in the default-mode network (DMN) while they are reduced in the...
Interface Focus
April 14, 2023
Georg Northoff, Philipp Klar, Magnus Bein et al.
30 citations
Consciousness is constituted by a structure that includes contents as foreground and the environment as background. This structural relation between the experiential foreground and background presupposes a relationship between the brain and the environment, often neglected in theories of consciousness. The temporo-spatial theory of consciousness addresses the brain-environment relation by a...
Early Intervention in Psychiatry
March 1, 2023
Lachlan Kent, Barnaby Nelson, Georg Northoff
35 citations
Time is a core aspect of psychopathology with potential for clinical use and early intervention. Temporal experience, perception, judgement and processing are distorted in various psychiatric disorders such as mood (depression and mania), anxiety, autistic, impulse-control, dissociative and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders. Can these disorders of time be used as early diagnostic or...
Human Brain Mapping
July 29, 2022
Hang Zhang, Shiyou Yang, Yang Qiao et al.
27 citations
The low-frequency (<0.1 Hz) fluctuation in sustained attention attracts enormous interest in cognitive neuroscience and clinical research since it always leads to cognitive and behavioral lapses. What is the source of the spontaneous fluctuation in sustained attention in neural activity, and how does the neural fluctuation relate to behavioral fluctuation? Here, we address these questions by...
The Neuroscientist
May 25, 2022
Georg Northoff, Deniz Vatansever, Andrea Scalabrini et al.
53 citations
What is the role of the brain's ongoing activity for cognition? The predominant perspectives associate ongoing brain activity with resting state, the default-mode network (DMN), and internally oriented mentation. This triad is often contrasted with task states, non-DMN brain networks, and externally oriented mentation, together comprising a "dual model" of brain and cognition. In opposition to...
Neuroimage
May 11, 2022
David Smith, Annemarie Wolff, Angelika Wolman et al.
40 citations
The self is characterized by an intrinsic temporal component consisting in continuity across time. On the neural level, this temporal continuity manifests in the brain's intrinsic neural timescales (INT) that can be measured by the autocorrelation window (ACW). Recent EEG studies reveal a relationship between resting state ACW and self-consciousness. However, it remains unclear whether ACW...
Entropy
February 13, 2022
Georg Northoff, Federico Zilio
47 citations
Time is a key element of consciousness as it includes multiple timescales from shorter to longer ones. This is reflected in our experience of various short-term phenomenal contents at discrete points in time as part of an ongoing, more continuous, and long-term 'stream of consciousness'. Can Integrated Information Theory (IIT) account for this multitude of timescales of consciousness? According...
Behavioural Brain Research
February 1, 2022
Georg Northoff, Federico Zilio
138 citations
Consciousness and its neural mechanisms remain a mystery. Current neuroscientific theories focus predominantly on the external input/stimulus and the associated stimulus-related activity during conscious contents. Despite all progress, we encounter two gaps: (i) a gap between spontaneous and stimulus-related activity; (ii) a gap between neuronal and phenomenal features. A novel, different, and...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2022
Austin Clinton Cooper, Bianca Ventura, Georg Northoff
54 citations
Abstract Meditation can exert a profound impact on our mental life, with proficient practitioners often reporting an experience free of boundaries between a separate self and the environment, suggesting an explicit experience of “nondual awareness.” What are the neural correlates of such experiences and how do they relate to the idea of nondual awareness itself? In order to unravel the effects...
Life (Basel, Switzerland)
June 24, 2021
Peter Walla, Georg Northoff, Cornelia Herbert
The self is an increasingly central topic in current neuroscience. Understanding the neural processes that are involved in self-referential processing and functioning may also be crucial to understanding consciousness. The current short communication goes beyond the typical concept that the self is singular, as has been assumed from neuroanatomical descriptions of the self by fMRI and PET...
Neuroimage
May 1, 2021
Pengmin Qin, Xuehai Wu, Changwei W Wu et al.
51 citations
Consciousness is a mental characteristic of the human mind, whose exact neural features remain unclear. We aimed to identify the critical nodes within the brain's global functional network that support consciousness. To that end, we collected a large fMRI resting state dataset with subjects in at least one of the following three consciousness states: preserved (including the healthy awake...
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
August 9, 2020
Georg Northoff, Victor A. F. Lamme
Various theories for the neural basis of consciousness have been proposed, suggesting a diversity of neural signs and mechanisms. We ask to what extent this diversity is real, or whether many theories share the same basic ideas with a potential for convergence towards a more unified theory of the neural basis of consciousness. For that purpose, we review and compare the various neural signs,...
Human Brain Mapping
July 22, 2020
Ivar R. Kolvoort, Soren Wainio-Theberge, Annemarie Wolff et al.
92 citations
The self is a multifaceted phenomenon that integrates information and experience across multiple time scales. How temporal integration on the psychological level of the self is related to temporal integration on the neuronal level remains unclear. To investigate temporal integration on the psychological level, we modified a well-established self-matching paradigm by inserting temporal delays....
Physics of Life Reviews
July 1, 2020
Georg Northoff, Soren Wainio-Theberge, Kathinka Evers
Neuroscience has made considerable progress in unraveling the neural correlates of mental phenomena like self, consciousness, and perception. However, the "common currency" shared between neuronal and mental activity, brain and mind, remains yet unclear. In this article, we propose that the dynamics of time and space provides a "common currency" that connects neuronal and mental features. Time...
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
January 26, 2020
Paul Frewen, M. Schroeter, Giuseppe Riva et al.
We review neuroimaging research investigating self-referential processing (SRP), that is, how we respond to stimuli that reference ourselves, prefaced by a lexical-thematic analysis of words indicative of "self-feelings". We consider SRP as occurring verbally (V-SRP) and non-verbally (NV-SRP), both in the controlled, "top-down" form of introspective and interoceptive tasks, respectively, as...
Psychiatry Research
January 14, 2020
Clemens C C Bauer, Kana Okano, Satrajit Ghosh et al.
87 citations
Auditory hallucinations (AHs) are one of the most distressing symptoms of schizophrenia (SZ) and are often resistant to medication. Imaging studies of individuals with SZ show hyperactivation of the default mode network (DMN) and the superior temporal gyrus (STG). Studies in SZ show DMN hyperconnectivity and reduced anticorrelation between DMN and the central executive network (CEN). DMN...
Entropy
December 1, 2019
Georg Northoff, Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Hayato Saigo
Consciousness is a central issue in neuroscience, however, we still lack a formal framework that can address the nature of the relationship between consciousness and its physical substrates. In this review, we provide a novel mathematical framework of category theory (CT), in which we can define and study the sameness between different domains of phenomena such as consciousness and its neural...
Human Brain Mapping
October 4, 2018
Annemarie Wolff, Daniel A. di Giovanni, Javier Gómez‐Pilar et al.
135 citations
The self is the core of our mental life. Previous investigations have demonstrated a strong neural overlap between self-related activity and resting state activity. This suggests that information about self-relatedness is encoded in our brain's spontaneous activity. The exact neuronal mechanisms of such "rest-self containment," however, remain unclear. The present EEG study investigated...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
October 4, 2018
Andrea Scalabrini, Clara Mucci, Georg Northoff
58 citations
The concept and the assessment of personality have been extensively discussed in psychoanalysis and in clinical psychology over the years. Nowadays there is large consensus in considering the constructs of the self and relatedness as central criterions to assess the personality and its disturbances. However, the relation between the psychological organization of personality, the construct of...
The Spontaneous Brain
September 14, 2018
Georg Northoff
Summary I so far focused mainly on the brain and how it is related to consciousness. This let me suppose that the brain, through its relation to the world, i.e., the world-brain relation, is necessary connected to consciousness (chapter 10). While this highlighted the central importance of the brain for the existence and reality of consciousness, the world itself and its ontological role were...
September 14, 2018
Georg Northoff
Mind vs Body? We traditionally attribute our mental features like consciousness to either mind or body – this amounts to the question for the relationship between mind or body, the mind-body problem. Various answers have been suggested to the mind-body problem in both philosophy and neuroscience. The neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and philosopher Georg Northoff takes a fundamentally different...
The Spontaneous Brain
September 14, 2018
Georg Northoff
Is the spectrum model of brain and its assumption of the hybrid nature of stimulus-induced activity relevant for consciousness? That is the focus in the present chapter. I here present various lines of empirical evidence focusing on disorders of consciousness like vegetative state, anesthesia, and sleep. These findings suggest that the loss of consciousness in vegetative state, anesthesia, and...
The Spontaneous Brain
September 14, 2018
Georg Northoff
In addition to the spectrum model, I also introduced an interaction model to characterize the brain’s neural activity (chapter 2). Is the interaction model of brain also relevant for consciousness? That is the focus in the present chapter. I here present various lines of empirical evidence focusing on disorders of consciousness like vegetative state, anesthesia, and sleep. Based on empirical...
The Spontaneous Brain
September 14, 2018
Georg Northoff
Is the prediction model of brain relevant for consciousness? The prediction model of brain is based on predictive coding that focuses on contents as associated with stimulus-induced activity. Stimulus-induced activity itself is conceived in a cognitive (rather than sensory) sense in that it is supposed to result from the interaction between predicted and actual inputs, i.e., the prediction...
The Spontaneous Brain
September 14, 2018
Georg Northoff
How can we account for the existence and reality of consciousness and mental features in general? The present chapter complements the previous one by shifting the focus from the ontological determination of the brain to consciousness. I characterized the brain’s existence and reality by world-brain relation for which I presupposed relation and structure as basic units of existence and reality....