University of Cambridge, Western University
38 papers in the library · 3,823 citations · publishing 2006-2026
Neuron October 6, 2026 Adrian M. Owen, Melvyn A Goodale
The recent controversies surrounding theories of consciousness invite a more fundamental reassessment of their scientific value. We argue that the field's most transformative advances have been driven by rigorous empirical research rather than overarching theoretical frameworks and that future progress may depend on returning to that tradition.
medRxiv August 31, 2026 Jonathan Huntley, Benjy Barnett, Daniel Bor et al. preprint
Despite extensive knowledge of the progressive sequence of cognitive and functional deficits in Alzheimer's Disease (AD), the impact of neurodegeneration on the conscious experience of patients remains largely unexplored. Understanding how the content of consciousness, particularly perceptual awareness, changes with the progression of AD is crucial to enable meaningful person-centred care. This...
Brain August 7, 2026 Dorottya Szocs, Andrea I. Luppi, Peter Coppola et al.
The precise neuromodulatory mechanisms underlying consciousness and its disorders, despite growing evidence in both animals and humans, remain poorly understood at the subcortical level. The basal ganglia, a key component of the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical loop, are known to play a crucial role in mediating consciousness and behavioural responsiveness to the environment. Here, we...
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...
Brain Communications 2026 Dorottya Szocs, Dian Lyu, Andrea I. Luppi et al.
Currently, there is substantial ongoing discussion around the functional role of the thalamus in consciousness. What is missing in the literature, however, is a systematic investigation of the relevance of specific thalamic nuclei in pharmacologically and pathologically altered states of consciousness in humans. Using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging in both healthy...
Frontiers in Science October 30, 2025 Karnig Kazazian, Adrian M. Owen
• Detecting covert awareness challenges long-standing assumptions about prognosis and end-of-life decisions, requiring new legal, ethical, and clinical frameworks to avoid misjudging patients' capacity and lived experience. • Progress in consciousness science requires large-scale, well-powered, multicenter collaborations using standardized protocols, and more emphasis on phenomenological,...
Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology May 25, 2025 Charlotte Maschke, Loretta Norton, Catherine Duclos et al.
Accurate assessment of the level of consciousness and potential to recover in patients with severe brain injury underpins crucial decisions in the intensive care unit but remains a major challenge for the clinical team. The neurological wake-up test is a widely used assessment tool. However, many patients' behavioral responses during a short interruption of sedation are ambiguous or absent,...
Neuropsychologia May 3, 2025 Matthew Kolisnyk, Geoffrey Laforge, Marie-Ève Gagnon et al.
Functional neuroimaging has fundamentally changed our understanding of disorders of consciousness (DoC). While many DoC patients exhibit minimal to no behavioural responsiveness, a significant minority show neural evidence of awareness and preserved cognitive functioning. Although several cognitive functions have been explored in DoC patients, autobiographical memory -- the ability to form and...
bioRxiv December 17, 2024 Dian Lyu, Ram Adapa, Robin Carhart-Harris et al. preprint
Abstract The relationship between the default mode network (DMN) and task-positive networks, such as the frontoparietal control network (FPCN), is a prominent feature of functional connectivity (FC) in the human brain. This relationship is primarily anticorrelated at rest in healthy brains and is disrupted in altered states of consciousness. Although the DMN and FPCN seem to perform distinct...
bioRxiv Preprint Server October 20, 2024 Peter Coppola, Adrian M. Owen, David K. Menon et al. preprint
Contemporary neuroscience research typically focuses on shared contents of experience and common neural states. Conversely, we set out to explore the neural correlates of individual- specific experiences that shape the distinct traits of each person. We propose an approach through which we compute individual-specific dynamics of functional connectivity states. These dynamics do not require...
Communications Biology September 30, 2024 Pablo Castro, Andrea I. Luppi, Enzo Tagliazucchi et al. 21 citations
Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging evolves through a repertoire of functional connectivity patterns which might reflect ongoing cognition, as well as the contents of conscious awareness. We investigated whether the dynamic exploration of these states can provide robust and generalizable markers for the state of consciousness in human participants, across loss of consciousness...
Elife July 18, 2024 Andrea I. Luppi, Pedro A. M. Mediano, Fernando E. Rosas et al. 49 citations
How is the information-processing architecture of the human brain organised, and how does its organisation support consciousness? Here, we combine network science and a rigorous information-theoretic notion of synergy to delineate a 'synergistic global workspace', comprising gateway regions that gather synergistic information from specialised modules across the human brain. This information is...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences March 1, 2024 Tim Bayne, Anil K. Seth, Marcello Massimini et al.
Which systems/organisms are conscious? New tests for consciousness ('C-tests') are urgently needed. There is persisting uncertainty about when consciousness arises in human development, when it is lost due to neurological disorders and brain injury, and how it is distributed in nonhuman species. This need is amplified by recent and rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI), neural...
PsyArXiv September 16, 2023 Stephen M Fleming, Chris Frith, Mel Goodale et al. preprint
The media, including news articles in both Nature and Science, have recently celebrated the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) as a ‘leading’ and empirically tested theory of consciousness. We are writing as researchers with some relevant expertise to express our concerns.
Communications Biology July 5, 2023 Idan E Nemirovsky, Nicholas J M Popiel, Jorge Rudas et al.
Integrated Information Theory was developed to explain and quantify consciousness, arguing that conscious systems consist of elements that are integrated through their causal properties. This study presents an implementation of Integrated Information Theory 3.0, the latest version of this framework, to functional MRI data. Data were acquired from 17 healthy subjects who underwent sedation with...
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...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience February 1, 2023 Jonathan Huntley, Daniel Bor, Feng Deng et al.
There is an urgent need to understand the nature of awareness in people with severe Alzheimer's disease (AD) to ensure effective person-centered care. Objective biomarkers of awareness validated in other clinical groups (e.g., anesthesia, minimally conscious states) offer an opportunity to investigate awareness in people with severe AD. In this article we demonstrate the feasibility of using...
Human Brain Mapping January 8, 2023 Feng Deng, Nicola Taylor, Adrian M. Owen et al.
Anaesthesia combined with functional neuroimaging provides a powerful approach for understanding the brain mechanisms of consciousness. Although propofol is used ubiquitously in clinical interventions that reversibly suppress consciousness, it shows large inter-individual variability, and the brain bases of this variability remain poorly understood. We asked whether three networks key to...
Neuroscience of Consciousness 2023 Sidath Rankaduwa, Adrian M. Owen 21 citations
Given their recent success in counseling and psychiatry, the dialogue around psychedelics has mainly focused on their applications for mental health. Insights from psychedelic research, however, are not limited to treating mental health, but also have much to offer our current understanding of consciousness. The investigation of psychedelic states has offered new perspectives on how different...
November 19, 2022 Sidath Rankaduwa, Adrian M. Owen, Emily Sophia Nichols preprint
Meditation has often been touted as a reliable way to improve one’s cognition. Several studies have demonstrated a variety of structural brain and behavioral changes related to meditation practice, further supporting its use as a cognitive intervention. However, many of these purported benefits have failed to replicate in similar studies. Recent reviews of the meditation/cognition literature...
Communications Biology November 3, 2022 Peter Coppola, Judith Allanson, Lorina Naci et al.
Typical consciousness can be defined as an individual-specific stream of experiences. Modern consciousness research on dynamic functional connectivity uses clustering techniques to create common bases on which to compare different individuals. We propose an alternative approach by combining modern theories of consciousness and insights arising from phenomenology and dynamical systems theory....
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...
Scientific Reports June 7, 2021 Evan Houldin, Zhuo Fang, Laura B Ray et al. 17 citations
Sleep resting state network (RSN) functional connectivity (FC) is poorly understood, particularly for rapid eye movement (REM), and in non-sleep deprived subjects. REM and non-REM (NREM) sleep involve competing drives; towards hypersynchronous cortical oscillations in NREM; and towards wake-like desynchronized oscillations in REM. This study employed simultaneous...
bioRxiv Preprint Server April 12, 2021 Peter Coppola, Lennart R.b. Spindler, Andrea I. Luppi et al. preprint
Small world topologies are thought to provide a valuable insight into human brain organisation and consciousness. However, functional magnetic resonance imaging studies in consciousness have not yielded consistent results. Given the importance of dynamics for both consciousness and cognition, here we investigate how the diversity of brain dynamics pertaining to small world topology (quantified...
Alzheimer's & Dementia 2021 Jonathan Huntley, Stephen M Fleming, Daniel C Mograbi et al.
People with Alzheimer's disease (AD) demonstrate a range of alterations in consciousness. Changes in awareness of cognitive deficit, self-awareness, and introspection are seen early in AD, and dysfunction of awareness and arousal progresses with increasing disease severity. However, heterogeneity of deficits between individuals and a lack of empirical studies in people with severe dementia...