Advanced Science
November 20, 2025
Paolo Cardone, Charlotte Martial, Yonatan Sanz Perl et al.
3 citations
Abstract Disorders of consciousness (DoC), including unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS) and minimally conscious state (MCS), have limited treatment options and are characterized by low complexity of brain activity. Recent research suggests that psychedelic drugs, which enhance the complexity of brain activity, could offer promising therapies. Here, individualized whole‐brain computational...
Journal of Neural Engineering
June 10, 2025
Daniel Polyakov, P A Robinson, Eli J Müller et al.
2 citations
Objective.Disorders of consciousness (DoC) remain a significant challenge in neurology, with traditional brain stimulation therapies showing limited and inconsistent efficacy across patients. This study presents a novel computational approach grounded in neural field theory for constructing personalized stimulus signals designed to induce healthy-like neural activity patterns in individuals...
Neurotherapeutics : the journal of the American Society for Experimental NeuroTherapeutics
April 18, 2025
Alice Barra, Rodrigo Huerta-Gutierrez, Jitka Annen et al.
3 citations
The treatment for patients with disorders of consciousness challenges researchers and clinicians. The stimulation of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) may enhance behavioral responsiveness of a subset of patients in a minimally conscious state, while having limited effects in unresponsive patients. However, heterogeneity in responses...
The International journal of clinical and experimental hypnosis
2025
Aminata Bicego, Naji Alnagger, Etzel Cardeña et al.
1 citation
Mystical-type experiences can be induced through techniques like hypnosis and meditation. These experiences are common in near-death experiences (NDEs) and have been linked to paranormal beliefs. This study explored auto-induced cognitive trance (AICT) as a method to induce mystical-type experiences and NDE outside of life threatening situations (NDE-like), as well as examining the influence of...
Neuromethods
2025
Naji Alnagger, Paolo Cardone, Javier Montupil et al.
AbstractKetamine is a versatile N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA)-antagonist used in various clinical settings. Ketamine dose-dependently induces psychoactive effects: at low, anti-hyperalgesic doses, these are minor or not detectable, but at subanesthetic doses, they may include dissociative, psychotomimetic, and psychedelic events. At an anesthetic dose, ketamine leads to a state of “(full)...
Neurosci Conscious
June 15, 2024
Paolo Cardone, Naji Alnagger, Jitka Annen et al.
16 citations
Modern medicine has been shaken by the surge of psychedelic science that proposes a new approach to mitigate mental disorders, such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Clinical trials to investigate whether psychedelic substances can treat psychiatric conditions are now underway, yet less discussion gravitates around their use in neurological disorders due to brain injury. One...
Neuroimage
June 1, 2024
Pradeep Kumar, Rajanikant Panda, Kanishka Sharma et al.
20 citations
High-order interactions are required across brain regions to accomplish specific cognitive functions. These functional interdependencies are reflected by synergistic information that can be obtained by combining the information from all the sources considered and redundant information (i.e., common information provided by all the sources). However, electroencephalogram (EEG) functional...
Frontiers in Neuroscience
February 13, 2024
Benedetta Cecconi, Javier Montupil, Sepehr Mortaheb et al.
6 citations
Background: Disconnected consciousness describes a state in which subjective experience (i.e., consciousness) becomes isolated from the external world. It appears frequently during sleep or sedation, when subjective experiences remain vivid but are unaffected by external stimuli. Traditional methods of differentiating connected and disconnected consciousness, such as relying on behavioral...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2024
Audrey Vanhaudenhuyse, Marie-Carmen Castillo, Charlotte Martial et al.
7 citations
Auto-induced cognitive trance (AICT) is a modified state of consciousness derived from shamanic tradition that can be practised by individuals after specific training. The aim of this work was to characterize the phenomenological experiences of AICT, using text mining analysis. Free recalls of subjective experiences were audio-recorded in 27 participants after five pseudo-randomized...
Journal of neuroscience methods
October 1, 2023
S Assadzadeh, Jitka Annen, Leandro R. D. Sanz et al.
Characterization of normal arousal states has been achieved by fitting predictions of corticothalamic neural field theory (NFT) to electroencephalographic (EEG) spectra to yield relevant physiological parameters. A prior fitting method is extended to distinguish conscious and unconscious states in healthy and brain injured subjects by identifying additional parameters and clusters in parameter...
Scientific Reports
September 22, 2023
Victor Oswald, Audrey Vanhaudenhuyse, Jitka Annen et al.
24 citations
Self-induced cognitive trance (SICT) is a voluntary non-ordinary state of consciousness characterized by a lucid yet narrowed awareness of the external surroundings. It involves a hyper-focused immersive experience of flow, expanded inner imagery, modified somatosensory processing, and an altered perception of self and time. SICT is gaining attention due to its potential clinical applications....
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
2023
Rajanikant Panda, Audrey Vanhaudenhuyse, Andrea Piarulli et al.
15 citations
Hypnosis has been shown to be of clinical utility; however, its underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear. This study aims to investigate altered brain dynamics during the non-ordinary state of consciousness induced by hypnosis. We studied high-density EEG in 9 healthy participants during eyes-closed wakefulness and during hypnosis, induced by a muscle relaxation and eyes fixation procedure....
bioRxiv Preprint Server
September 28, 2022
Yonatan Sanz Perl, Carla Pallavicini, Juan Piccinini et al.
preprint
Brain states are frequently represented using a unidimensional scale measuring the richness of subjective experience (level of consciousness). This description assumes a mapping between the high-dimensional space of whole-brain configurations and the trajectories of brain states associated with changes in consciousness, yet this mapping and its properties remain unknown. We combined whole-brain...
Communications Biology
June 29, 2022
Anira Escrichs, Yonatan Sanz Perl, Carme Uribe et al.
67 citations
Significant advances have been made by identifying the levels of synchrony of the underlying dynamics of a given brain state. This research has demonstrated that non-conscious dynamics tend to be more synchronous than in conscious states, which are more asynchronous. Here we go beyond this dichotomy to demonstrate that different brain states are underpinned by dissociable spatiotemporal...
BMC Medical Ethics
March 27, 2022
Michele Farisco, Cyriel M A Pennartz, Jitka Annen et al.
Abstract Background Assessing consciousness in other subjects, particularly in non-verbal and behaviourally disabled subjects (e.g., patients with disorders of consciousness), is notoriously challenging but increasingly urgent. The high rate of misdiagnosis among disorders of consciousness raises the need for new perspectives in order to inspire new technical and clinical approaches. Main body...
Nature Communications
February 25, 2022
Minji Lee, Leandro R. D. Sanz, Alice Barra et al.
120 citations
Consciousness can be defined by two components: arousal (wakefulness) and awareness (subjective experience). However, neurophysiological consciousness metrics able to disentangle between these components have not been reported. Here, we propose an explainable consciousness indicator (ECI) using deep learning to disentangle the components of consciousness. We employ electroencephalographic (EEG)...
Journal of Neuroscience
March 23, 2021
Diego Candia‐rivera, Jitka Annen, Olivia Gosseries et al.
81 citations
The neural monitoring of visceral inputs might play a role in first-person perspective (i.e., the unified viewpoint of subjective experience). In healthy participants, how the brain responds to heartbeats, measured as the heartbeat-evoked response (HER), correlates with perceptual, bodily, and self-consciousness. Here we show that HERs in resting-state EEG data distinguishes between...
Brain Structure and Function
2021
Jitka Annen, Rajanikant Panda, Charlotte Martial et al.
15 citations
peer reviewedVoluntary apnea showcases extreme human adaptability in trained individuals like professional free divers. We evaluated the psychological and physiological adaptation and the functional cerebral changes using electroencephalography (EEG) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to 6.5 min of dry static apnea performed by a world champion free diver. Compared to resting...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
July 2, 2020
Yonatan Sanz Perl, Carla Pallavicini, Ignacio Perez-Ipina et al.
preprint
Consciousness transiently fades away during deep sleep, more stably under anesthesia, and sometimes permanently due to brain injury. The development of an index to quantify the level of consciousness across these different states is regarded as a key problem both in basic and clinical neuroscience. We argue that this problem is ill-defined since such an index would not exhaust all the relevant...
Memory
June 12, 2019
Héléna Cassol, Charlotte Martial, Jitka Annen et al.
60 citations
Near-death experiences (NDEs) are usually associated with positive affect, however, a small proportion are considered distressing. We aimed to look into the proportion of distressing NDEs in a sample of NDE narratives, categorise distressing narratives according to Greyson and Bush’s classification (inverse, void or hellish), and compare distressing and “classical” NDEs. Participants wrote down...
arXiv Preprint Archive
May 10, 2016
Enrico Amico, Daniele Marinazzo, Carol DiPerri et al.
Examining task-free functional connectivity (FC) in the human brain offers insights on how spontaneous integration and segregation of information relate to human cognition, and how this organization may be altered in different conditions, and neurological disorders. This is particularly relevant for patients in disorders of consciousness (DOC) following severe acquired brain damage and coma,...