Significant advances in the scientific investigation of the neurobiology of consciousness have been slow to be translated into clinical settings, limited by factors of conceptual (e.g., what is consciousness?), methodological (e.g., how to identify reliable indicators of consciousness?), and technical (e.g., how to improve sensitivity and specificity of the technological identification of...
The cerebral cortex spontaneously displays different patterns of activity that evolve over time according to the brain state. Sleep, wakefulness, resting states, and attention are examples of a wide spectrum of physiological states that can be sustained by the same structural network. Furthermore, additional states are generated by drugs (e.g., different levels of anesthesia) or by pathological...
Hemispherotomy is a neurosurgical procedure for treating refractory epilepsy, which entails disconnecting a significant portion of the cortex, potentially encompassing an entire hemisphere, from its cortical and subcortical connections. While this intervention prevents the spread of seizures, it raises important questions. Given the complete isolation from sensory-motor pathways, it remains...
Current BiologyJune 9, 2025Davide Albertini, Maria Del Vecchio, Ivana Sartori et al.9 citations
Distilling the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) in humans is challenging due to limitations in the spatiotemporal resolution of recording techniques and confounds related to pre- and post-perceptual processes. In this study, we leveraged the detailed insights provided by human intracortical recordings to elucidate how somatosensory responses to simple tactile stimuli vary across...
How is conscious experience related to material brain processes? A variety of theories aiming to answer this age-old question have emerged from the recent surge in consciousness research, and some are now hotly debated. Although most researchers have so far focused on the development and validation of their preferred theory in relative isolation, this article, written by a group of scientists...
Abstract Application of complexity measures to neurophysiological time series has seen increased use in recent years to identify neural correlates of global states of consciousness. Lempel-Ziv complexity is currently the de-facto complexity measure used in these investigations. However, by simply counting the number of patterns, this measure theoretically takes its maximum value for data that...
Loss of consciousness can result from a wide range of causes, including natural sleep and pharmacologically induced anesthesia. Important insights might thus come from identifying neuronal mechanisms of loss and re-emergence of consciousness independent of a specific manipulation. Therefore, to seek neuronal signatures of loss of consciousness common to sleep and anesthesia we analyzed...
Key to understanding the neuronal basis of consciousness is the characterization of the neural signatures of changes in level of consciousness during sleep. Here we analysed three measures of dynamical complexity on spontaneous depth electrode recordings from 10 epilepsy patients during wakeful rest (WR) and different stages of sleep: (i) Lempel-Ziv complexity, which is derived from how...
OBJECTIVE: Validating objective, brain-based indices of consciousness in behaviorally unresponsive patients represents a challenge due to the impossibility of obtaining independent evidence through subjective reports. Here we address this problem by first validating a promising metric of consciousness-the Perturbational Complexity Index (PCI)-in a benchmark population who could confirm the...
A multivariate autoregressive (MVAR) model with exogenous inputs (MVARX) is developed for describing the cortical interactions excited by direct electrical current stimulation of the cortex. Current stimulation is challenging to model because it excites neurons in multiple locations both near and distant to the stimulation site. The approach presented here models these effects using an...