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...
bioRxiv
April 21, 2026
A. Liardi, Daniel Bor, Fernando E. Rosas et al.
preprint
Recent advances have shown that the complexity of neural signals tracks global states of consciousness, such as wakefulness versus sleep. However, it is still unclear to what extent neural complexity reflects fine-grained changes in conscious content within the same global state. Here, we investigate how the complexity of brain signals is affected by increased perceptual clarity of a stimulus....
arXiv Preprint Archive
April 13, 2026
Adam B. Barrett, Borjan Milinkovic, Pedro A. M. Mediano et al.
The integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT) is uniquely ambitious in proposing a mathematical formula, derived from apparently fundamental properties of conscious experience, to describe the quantity and quality of consciousness for any physical system that possesses it. IIT has generated considerable debate, which has engendered some misunderstandings and misrepresentations. Here...
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...
ACS Chemical Neuroscience
February 7, 2024
Pedro A. M. Mediano, Fernando E. Rosas, Christopher Timmermann et al.
60 citations
Recent findings have shown that psychedelics reliably enhance brain entropy (understood as neural signal diversity), and this effect has been associated with both acute and long-term psychological outcomes, such as personality changes. These findings are particularly intriguing, given that a decrease of brain entropy is a robust indicator of loss of consciousness (e.g., from wakefulness to...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
November 9, 2023
Fernando E. Rosas, Pedro A. M. Mediano, Christopher Timmermann et al.
14 citations
preprint
A growing body of work shows that autonomic signals provide a privileged evidence-stream to capture various aspects of subjective and neural states. This work investigates the potential for autonomic markers to track the effects of psychedelics — potent psychoactive drugs with important scientific and clinical value. For this purpose, we introduce a novel Bayesian framework to estimate the...
Neuroimage
February 11, 2023
Andrea I. Luppi, Pedro A. M. Mediano, Fernando E. Rosas et al.
High-level brain functions are widely believed to emerge from the orchestrated activity of multiple neural systems. However, lacking a formal definition and practical quantification of emergence for experimental data, neuroscientists have been unable to empirically test this long-standing conjecture. Here we investigate this fundamental question by leveraging a recently proposed framework known...
Neuroimage
November 1, 2022
Hardik Rajpal, Pedro A. M. Mediano, Fernando E. Rosas et al.
23 citations
Schizophrenia and states induced by certain psychotomimetic drugs may share some physiological and phenomenological properties, but they differ in fundamental ways: one is a crippling chronic mental disease, while the others are temporary, pharmacologically-induced states presently being explored as treatments for mental illnesses. Building towards a deeper understanding of these different...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
June 1, 2022
Pedro A. M. Mediano, Fernando E. Rosas, Daniel Bor et al.
109 citations
The integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT) is unprecedentedly ambitious in that it proposes a universal mathematical formula, derived from fundamental properties of conscious experience, to describe the quality of consciousness that it the of consciousness of in the the of in the the a of the that a from a of a the of the The integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT) is...
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences
May 23, 2022
Pedro A. M. Mediano, Fernando E. Rosas, Andrea I. Luppi et al.
73 citations
Emergence is a profound subject that straddles many scientific disciplines, including the formation of galaxies and how consciousness arises from the collective activity of neurons. Despite the broad interest that exists on this concept, the study of emergence has suffered from a lack of formalisms that could be used to guide discussions and advance theories. Here, we summarize, elaborate on,...
Communications Biology
April 20, 2022
Andrea I. Luppi, Pedro A. M. Mediano, Fernando E. Rosas et al.
The human brain entertains rich spatiotemporal dynamics, which are drastically reconfigured when consciousness is lost due to anaesthesia or disorders of consciousness (DOC). Here, we sought to identify the neurobiological mechanisms that explain how transient pharmacological intervention and chronic neuroanatomical injury can lead to common reconfigurations of neural activity. We developed and...
The European journal of neuroscience
March 1, 2022
Claudia Pascovich, Santiago Castro-Zaballa, Pedro A. M. Mediano et al.
16 citations
There is increasing evidence that the level of consciousness can be captured by neural informational complexity: for instance, complexity, as measured by the Lempel Ziv (LZ) compression algorithm, decreases during anaesthesia and non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep in humans and rats, when compared with LZ in awake and REM sleep. In contrast, LZ is higher in humans under the effect of...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
November 1, 2021
Andrea I. Luppi, Pedro A. M. Mediano, Fernando E. Rosas et al.
42 citations
Abstract A central question in neuroscience concerns the relationship between consciousness and its physical substrate. Here, we argue that a richer characterization of consciousness can be obtained by viewing it as constituted of distinct information-theoretic elements. In other words, we propose a shift from quantification of consciousness—viewed as integrated information—to its...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
September 23, 2021
Pedro A. M. Mediano, Aleksi Ikkala, Rogier Kievit et al.
30 citations
preprint
ABSTRACT There has been considerable recent progress in measuring conscious level using neural complexity measures. For instance, such measures can reliably distinguish healthy awake from asleep subjects and vegetative state patients. However, this line of research has never explored the dynamics of conscious level during normal wakefulness. Being able to capture meaningful differences in...
Alzheimer's & dementia (New York, N. Y.)
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...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
August 3, 2020
David J. Schwartzman, Aleš Oblak, Nicolas Rothen et al.
4 citations
preprint
Grapheme-colour synaesthesia (GCS) is defined by additional perceptual experiences, which are automatically and consistently triggered by specific inducing stimuli. The associative nature of GCS has motivated attempts to induce synaesthesia by means of associative learning. Two recent studies have shown that extensive associative training can generate not only behavioural (consistency and...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
December 9, 2019
David J. Schwartzman, Daniel Bor, Nicolas Rothen et al.
7 citations
People with synaesthesia have additional perceptual experiences, which are automatically and consistently triggered by specific inducing stimuli. Synaesthesia therefore offers a unique window into the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying conscious perception. A long-standing question in synaesthesia research is whether it is possible to artificially induce non-synaesthetic individuals to have...
Pedro A. M. Mediano, Fernando E. Rosas, Andrea I. Luppi et al.
10 citations
Abstract Quantifying the complexity of neural activity has provided fundamental insights into cognition, consciousness, and clinical conditions. However, the most widely used approach to estimate the complexity of neural dynamics, Lempel-Ziv complexity (LZ), has fundamental limitations that substantially restrict its domain of applicability. In this article we leverage the information-theoretic...