bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
August 20, 2026
Atakan Selte, Steven E. Haworth, Thomas J. Vanasse et al.
preprint
Abstract Identifying neural signatures of consciousness remains a central challenge in neuroscience. Sleep offers a tractable model for comparing brain activity in the presence or absence of subjective experience while minimizing behavioral responsiveness confounds. Using overnight 256-electrode high-density EEG in 140 participants and a serial-awakening paradigm, we analyzed 699 non-rapid eye...
arXiv Preprint Archive
August 19, 2026
Jeremiah Hendren, Matteo Grasso, Francesco Ellia et al.
preprint
Integrated Information Theory (IIT) proposes that all quality is structure: the quality of every experience can be characterized as a phenomenal structure and accounted for as a causal structure. The IIT method can be called intrinsic in that, first, it starts by characterizing the intrinsic structure of a single experience in an absolute sense (not relative to other experiences) and, second,...
August 13, 2026
Giulio Tononi, Andrew Haun, Chen Song et al.
Everyone lives within a Perception Box (PB). What we see and hear—how we interpret it and what it means to us—depends on our brain and learning history. Recognizing that perception is subjective, and understanding why, are key steps to open our minds, counteract bias, and reduce suffering. This project seeks to establish a rigorous theoretical and empirical foundation for the science of the PB....
arXiv Preprint Archive
August 12, 2026
Kallum Robinson, Giulio Tononi, Naotsugu Tsuchiya et al.
The classical problem of Other Minds has dogged philosophers for millennia; asking if we have any way to truly understand the experience of another mind. We know our own intrinsic experience by acquaintance, but can only ever hope to possess an extrinsic description of another's, with the two separated by an acquaintance gap. Structural approaches aim to characterise experience in terms of a...
arXiv Preprint Archive
August 11, 2026
Matteo Grasso, Jeremiah Hendren, Giulio Tononi
To be conscious is to have an experience - not a collection of phenomenal atoms, but a structured whole composed of distinctions and the relations that bind them. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) identifies the essential properties of every experience (axioms), formulates them operationally as postulates that a substrate must satisfy, and unfolds the cause-effect power of the resulting...
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
August 1, 2026
Andrew W. Corcoran, Andrew M. Haun, Reinder Dorman et al.
As neuroscientific theories of consciousness continue to proliferate, the need to assess their similarities and differences - as well as their predictive and explanatory power - becomes ever more pressing. Recently, a number of structured adversarial collaborations have been devised to test the competing predictions of several candidate theories of consciousness. In this review, we compare and...
Entropy (Basel, Switzerland)
April 4, 2026
William G. P. Mayner, William Marshall, Giulio Tononi
Integrated information theory (IIT) starts from the existence of consciousness and characterizes its essential properties: every experience is intrinsic, specific, unitary, definite, and structured. IIT then formulates existence and its essential properties operationally in terms of cause-effect power of a substrate of units. Here, we address IIT's operational requirements for existence by...
PLoS One
2026
Clement Abbatecola, Bernard Marius ’t Hart, Belén M. Montabes De la Cruz et al.
We investigate the subjective experience of space around the visual blind spot area, the cortical representation of which is missing feedforward connectivity from one eye. We performed these experiments as part of an adversarial collaboration to test contrasting theories of consciousness; Integrated Information Theory (IIT), Predictive Processing Active Inference (AI), and Predictive Processing...
PLoS One
2026
Matilda Gibbons, Ethan G McBride, Raghuram Holenarasipura Venkatasubbaiah et al.
Identifying the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) is widely regarded as imperative to our understanding of consciousness. Although several scientific theories of consciousness make predictions about the NCC, they often differ in their level of detail, making direct comparison through experimental findings difficult. Here, we report an adversarial collaboration protocol in which unbiased...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
William Marshall, Graham Findlay, Larissa Albantakis et al.
Integrated information theory (IIT) aims to account for the quality and quantity of consciousness in physical terms. According to IIT, a substrate of consciousness must be a system of units (e.g. synapses, neurons, minicolumns, etc.) that is a maximum of intrinsic, specific, unitary cause-effect power, quantified by integrated information ([Formula: see text]). The grain of each unit must be...
PLoS One
December 4, 2025
Jonathan Robinson, Andrew W. Corcoran, Christopher J. Whyte et al.
1 citation
Active inference, a first-principles framework for modelling the behaviour of sentient agents, is beginning to be applied in consciousness research. One hypothesis arising from the framework is that active inference is necessary for changes in conscious content. As one component of an extensive adversarial collaboration among competing theories of consciousness, active inference will be...
arXiv Preprint Archive
October 29, 2025
Giulio Tononi, Melanie Boly
This overview of integrated information theory (IIT) emphasizes IIT's "consciousness-first" approach to what exists. Consciousness demonstrates to each of us that something exists--experience--and reveals its essential properties--the axioms of phenomenal existence. IIT formulates these properties operationally, yielding the postulates of physical existence. To exist intrinsically or...
iScience
October 17, 2025
Renzo Comolatti, Matteo Grasso, Giulio Tononi
Time flows-or at least the time of our experience does. Can we provide an objective account of why the conscious present encompasses a succession of moments that slip from now to then-an account of why time feels flowing? Integrated Information Theory (IIT) aims to account for both the presence and quality of consciousness in objective, physical terms. Given a substrate's architecture and...
arXiv Preprint Archive
October 4, 2025
William G. P. Mayner, William Marshall, Giulio Tononi
Integrated information theory (IIT) starts from the existence of consciousness and characterizes its essential properties: every experience is intrinsic, specific, unitary, definite, and structured. IIT then formulates existence and its essential properties operationally in terms of cause-effect power of a substrate of units. Here we address IIT's operational requirements for existence by...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
July 3, 2025
Andrew M. Haun, Giulio Tononi
5 citations
Many hold that visual experience is sparse and its richness illusory, relying on high-level summaries rather than detailed content. However, we argue here that seeing is more than this - it is unfathomably rich. We distinguish three levels of visual phenomenology: high level object and scene categorizations; mid-level feature groupings; and a fundamental spatial field composed of spots and...
Nature
June 1, 2025
Oscar Ferrante, Urszula Gorska-Klimowska, Simon Henin et al.
94 citations
Different theories explain how subjective experience arises from brain activity1,2. These theories have independently accrued evidence, but have not been directly compared3. Here we present an open science adversarial collaboration directly juxtaposing integrated information theory (IIT)4,5 and global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT)6-10 via a theory-neutral consortium11-13. The theory...
PLoS One
2025
Kengo Takahashi, Samuel Pontes Quero, Julien Fiorilli et al.
A major debate in the field of consciousness pertains to whether neuronal activity or rather the causal structure of neural circuits underlie the generation of conscious experience. The former position is held by theoretical accounts of consciousness based on the predictive processing framework (such as neurorepresentationalism and active inference), while the latter is posited by the...
arXiv Preprint Archive
December 30, 2024
William G. P. Mayner, Bjørn Erik Juel, Giulio Tononi
Integrated information theory (IIT) argues that the substrate of consciousness is a maximally irreducible complex of units. Together, subsets of the complex specify a cause-effect structure, composed of distinctions and their relations, which accounts in full for the quality of experience. The feeling of a specific experience is also its meaning for the subject, which is thus defined...
arXiv Preprint Archive
December 14, 2024
Alireza Zaeemzadeh, Giulio Tononi
Information theory, introduced by Shannon, has been extremely successful and influential as a mathematical theory of communication. Shannon's notion of information does not consider the meaning of the messages being communicated but only their probability. Even so, computational approaches regularly appeal to "information processing" to study how meaning is encoded and decoded in natural and...
arXiv Preprint Archive
December 5, 2024
Graham Findlay, William Marshall, Larissa Albantakis et al.
Developments in machine learning and computing power suggest that artificial general intelligence is within reach. This raises the question of artificial consciousness: if a computer were to be functionally equivalent to a human, being able to do all we do, would it experience sights, sounds, and thoughts, as we do when we are conscious? Answering this question in a principled manner can only...
arXiv Preprint Archive
November 30, 2024
Renzo Comolatti, Matteo Grasso, Giulio Tononi
Time flows, or at least the time of our experience does. Can we provide an objective account of why experience, confined to the short window of the conscious present, encompasses a succession of moments that slip away from now to then--an account of why time feels flowing? Integrated Information Theory (IIT) aims to account for both the presence and quality of consciousness in objective,...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
April 18, 2024
Melanie Boly, Richard Smith, Giulietta Vigueras Borrego et al.
5 citations
preprint
Pure presence (PP) is described in several meditative traditions as an experience of a vast, vivid space devoid of perceptual objects, thoughts, and self. Integrated information theory (IIT) predicts that such vivid experiences may occur when the cortical substrate of consciousness is virtually silent. To test this, we analyzed high-quality 256-electrode high-density electroencephalography...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
June 23, 2023
Oscar Ferrante, Urszula Gorska-Klimowska, Simon Henin et al.
preprint
Different theories explain how subjective experience arises from brain activity1,2. These theories have independently accrued evidence, yet, confirmation bias and dependence on design choices hamper progress in the field3. Here, we present an open science adversarial collaboration which directly juxtaposes Integrated Information Theory (IIT)4,5 and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT)6–10,...
iScience
May 19, 2023
Andres Ort, John W Smallridge, Simone Sarasso et al.
47 citations
Exploring the neurobiology of the profound changes in consciousness induced by classical psychedelic drugs may require novel neuroimaging methods. Serotonergic psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin produce states of increased sensory-emotional awareness and arousal, accompanied by increased spontaneous electroencephalographic (EEG) signal diversity. By directly stimulating cortical tissue, the...
arXiv Preprint Archive
May 16, 2023
Alireza Zaeemzadeh, Giulio Tononi
Originally developed as a theory of consciousness, integrated information theory provides a mathematical framework to quantify the causal irreducibility of systems and subsets of units in the system. Specifically, mechanism integrated information quantifies how much of the causal powers of a subset of units in a state, also referred to as a mechanism, cannot be accounted for by its parts. If...