Clinical EEG and Neuroscience
2014
Simone Sarasso, Mario Rosanova, Adenauer G. Casali et al.
164 citations
We normally assess another individual's level of consciousness based on her or his ability to interact with the surrounding environment and communicate. Usually, if we observe purposeful behavior, appropriate responses to sensory inputs, and, above all, appropriate answers to questions, we can be reasonably sure that the person is conscious. However, we know that consciousness can be entirely...
Science Translational Medicine
August 14, 2013
Adenauer G. Casali, Olivia Gosseries, Mario Rosanova et al.
1,299 citations
One challenging aspect of the clinical assessment of brain-injured, unresponsive patients is the lack of an objective measure of consciousness that is independent of the subject's ability to interact with the external environment. Theoretical considerations suggest that consciousness depends on the brain's ability to support complex activity patterns that are, at once, distributed among...
Human Brain Mapping
July 1, 2013
Zirui Huang, Rui Dai, Xuehai Wu et al.
104 citations
Recent studies have demonstrated resting-state abnormalities in midline regions in vegetative state/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome and minimally conscious state patients. However, the functional implications of these resting-state abnormalities remain unclear. Recent findings in healthy subjects have revealed a close overlap between the neural substrate of self-referential processing and the...
PLoS One
March 27, 2013
Marie Thonnard, Vanessa Charland-Verville, Serge Brédart et al.
140 citations
Since the dawn of time, Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) have intrigued and, nowadays, are still not fully explained. Since reports of NDEs are proposed to be imagined events, and since memories of imagined events have, on average, fewer phenomenological characteristics than real events memories, we here compared phenomenological characteristics of NDEs reports with memories of imagined and real...
February 26, 2013
Vincent Bonhomme, Pierre Boveroux, J. F. Brichant et al.
71 citations
This paper reviews the current knowledge about the mechanisms of anesthesia-induced alteration of consciousness. It is now evident that hypnotic anesthetic agents have specific brain targets whose function is hierarchically altered in a dose-dependent manner. Higher order networks, thought to be involved in mental content generation, as well as sub-cortical networks involved in thalamic...
Frontiers in Psychology
2013
Melanie Boly, Anil K. Seth, Melanie Wilke et al.
295 citations
This joint article reflects the authors' personal views regarding noteworthy advances in the neuroscience of consciousness in the last 10 years, and suggests what we feel may be promising future directions. It is based on a small conference at the Samoset Resort in Rockport, Maine, USA, in July of 2012, organized by the Mind Science Foundation of San Antonio, Texas. Here, we summarize recent...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
March 26, 2012
Melanie Boly, Vincent Perlbarg, Guillaume Marrelec et al.
201 citations
Consciousness is reduced during nonrapid eye movement (NREM) sleep due to changes in brain function that are still poorly understood. Here, we tested the hypothesis that impaired consciousness during NREM sleep is associated with an increased modularity of brain activity. Cerebral connectivity was quantified in resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging times series acquired in 13...
Anesthesiology
February 7, 2012
Robert D. Sanders, Giulio Tononi, Steven Laureys et al.
478 citations
Consciousness is subjective experience. During both sleep and anesthesia, consciousness is common, evidenced by dreaming. A defining feature of dreaming is that, while conscious, we do not experience our environment; we are disconnected. Besides inducing behavioral unresponsiveness, a key goal of anesthesia is to prevent the experience of surgery (connected consciousness), by inducing either...
Neuroimage
May 15, 2011
Christophe Phillips, Marie-Aurélie Bruno, Pierre Maquet et al.
The vegetative state is a devastating condition where patients awaken from their coma (i.e., open their eyes) but fail to show any behavioural sign of conscious awareness. Locked-in syndrome patients also awaken from their coma and are unable to show any motor response to command (except for small eye movements or blinks) but recover full conscious awareness of self and environment. Bedside...
Science (New York, N.Y.)
May 13, 2011
Melanie Boly, Marta Isabel Garrido, Olivia Gosseries et al.
Frontoparietal cortex is involved in the explicit processing (awareness) of stimuli. Frontoparietal activation has also been found in studies of subliminal stimulus processing. We hypothesized that an impairment of top-down processes, involved in recurrent neuronal message-passing and the generation of long-latency electrophysiological responses, might provide a more reliable correlate of...
Medecine sciences : M/S
January 2011
Marie Thonnard, Melanie Boly, Marie-Aurélie Bruno et al.
Vegetative and minimally conscious states diagnosis remained a major clinical challenge. New paradigms such as measurement of the global cerebral metabolism, the structural and functional integrity of fronto-parietal network, or the spontaneous activity in resting state have been shown to be helpful to disentangle vegetative from minimally conscious patients. Active neuroimagery paradigms also...
Anesthesiology
September 30, 2010
Pierre Boveroux, Audrey Vanhaudenhuyse, Marie-Aurélie Bruno et al.
645 citations
BACKGROUND: Mechanisms of anesthesia-induced loss of consciousness remain poorly understood. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging allows investigating whole-brain connectivity changes during pharmacological modulation of the level of consciousness. METHODS: Low-frequency spontaneous blood oxygen level-dependent fluctuations were measured in 19 healthy volunteers during...
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
June 1, 2010
Audrey Vanhaudenhuyse, Athena Demertzi, Manuel Schabus et al.
460 citations
Evidence from functional neuroimaging studies on resting state suggests that there are two distinct anticorrelated cortical systems that mediate conscious awareness: an "extrinsic" system that encompasses lateral fronto-parietal areas and has been linked with processes of external input (external awareness), and an "intrinsic" system which encompasses mainly medial brain areas and has been...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
March 1, 2009
Athena Demertzi, Charlene Liew, Didier Ledoux et al.
125 citations
The relationship between mind and brain has philosophical, scientific, and practical implications. Two separate but related surveys from the University of Edinburgh (University students, n= 250) and the University of Liège (health-care workers, lay public, n= 1858) were performed to probe attitudes toward the mind-brain relationship and the variables that account for differences in views. Four...
Human Brain Mapping
May 8, 2008
Melanie Boly, Christophe Phillips, Evelyne Balteau et al.
73 citations
The origin of within-subject variability in perceptual experiments is poorly understood. We here review evidence that baseline brain activity in the areas involved in sensory perception predict subsequent variations in sensory awareness. We place these findings in light of recent findings on the architecture of spontaneous BOLD fluctuations in the awake human brain, and discuss the possible...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
May 1, 2008
Melanie Boly, Christophe Phillips, L. Tshibanda et al.
396 citations
Spontaneous brain activity has recently received increasing interest in the neuroimaging community. However, the value of resting-state studies to a better understanding of brain-behavior relationships has been challenged. That altered states of consciousness are a privileged way to study the relationships between spontaneous brain activity and behavior is proposed, and common resting-state...
International Anesthesiology Clinics
2008
Pierre Boveroux, Vincent Bonhomme, Melanie Boly et al.
44 citations
peer reviewed
Science
March 2, 2007
Adrian M. Owen, Martin R. Coleman, Melanie Boly et al.
72 citations
Additional data, supported by relevant functional neuroimaging literature, confirm that the “normal” patterns of brain activity reported in a patient who was clinically diagnosed as vegetative could not have occurred “automatically” in the absence of conscious awareness. The most parsimonious explanation remains that this patient was consciously aware despite her diagnosis of vegetative state.
Science
September 7, 2006
Adrian M. Owen, Martin R. Coleman, Melanie Boly et al.
1,974 citations
We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to demonstrate preserved conscious awareness in a patient fulfilling the criteria for a diagnosis of vegetative state. When asked to imagine playing tennis or moving around her home, the patient activated predicted cortical areas in a manner indistinguishable from that of healthy volunteers.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
June 1, 2005
Bernard J. Baars, Steven Laureys
Although we admire Ned Block's effort to include cognitive neuroscience in his philosophical work, we cannot agree with his interpretation of the evidence [1xTwo neural correlates of consciousness. Block, N. Trends Cogn. Sci. 2005; 9: 46–52Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (252)See all References[1]. Block has long argued that there are two kinds of consciousness:...
Cristian Pulido, Francisco Gómez, Prejaas K.b. Tewarie et al.
preprint
Near-death experiences (NDEs) are often studied using both structured questionnaires and narrative reports, yet these representations cannot be assumed to provide interchangeable representations of the same experience. Narratives allow flexible expression of different aspects of the experience, whereas questionnaires organize reports into predefined dimensions and retrospective evaluations. How...