medRxiv
July 10, 2026
Lada Kohoutová, Jevita Potheegadoo, Léa F Duong Phan Thanh et al.
Background: Hallucinations, ranging from minor (MH) to structured, are a common non-motor symptom in Parkinson's disease (PD). Structured hallucinations have been associated with altered functional connectivity (FC) between dorsal/ventral attention (DAN, VAN) and default mode (DMN) networks. As structured hallucinations are linked to rapid cognitive decline and MH are often viewed as their...
medRxiv
June 25, 2025
Devon Stoliker, Fosco Bernasconi, Olaf Blanke et al.
1 citation
preprint
Abstract Serotonergic psychedelics alter self-boundaries and can induce out-of-body experiences (OBEs)—the sense of being located outside one’s physical body. While OBEs also occur in clinical conditions and can be experimentally induced, their neural basis under psychedelics remains underexplored. In an open-label, baseline-controlled MRI study of 62 healthy adults administered psilocybin, we...
Elife
May 22, 2025
Michael Pereira, Nathan Faivre, Fosco Bernasconi et al.
3 citations
Subcortical brain structures such as the subthalamic nucleus or the thalamus are involved in regulating motor and cognitive behavior. However, their contribution to perceptual consciousness remains unclear, due to the inherent difficulties of recording subcortical neuronal activity in humans. Here, we asked neurological patients undergoing surgery for deep brain stimulation to detect weak...
Psychological Medicine
February 1, 2024
Pavo Orepic, Fosco Bernasconi, Melissa Faggella et al.
9 citations
Inducing hallucinations under controlled experimental conditions in non-hallucinating individuals represents a novel research avenue oriented toward understanding complex hallucinatory phenomena, avoiding confounds observed in patients. Auditory-verbal hallucinations (AVH) are one of the most common and distressing psychotic symptoms, whose etiology remains largely unknown. Two prominent...
Nature Communications
May 31, 2021
M. Pereira, P. Mégevand, Mi Xue Tan et al.
A fundamental scientific question concerns the neural basis of perceptual consciousness and perceptual monitoring resulting from the processing of sensory events. Although recent studies identified neurons reflecting stimulus visibility, their functional role remains unknown. Here, we show that perceptual consciousness and monitoring involve evidence accumulation. We recorded single-neuron...
Cerebral Cortex
July 16, 2013
Fosco Bernasconi, André Schmidt, Thomas Pokorny et al.
62 citations
Emotional face processing is critically modulated by the serotonergic system. For instance, emotional face processing is impaired by acute psilocybin administration, a serotonin (5-HT) 1A and 2A receptor agonist. However, the spatiotemporal brain mechanisms underlying these modulations are poorly understood. Here, we investigated the spatiotemporal brain dynamics underlying psilocybin-induced...