bioRxiv Preprint Server
March 4, 2024
Umed Boltaev, Hyun W. Park, Keaon R. Brown et al.
4 citations
preprint
Induction of neuroplasticity has become the dominant explanatory framework for the rapid and sustained therapeutic effects of classic psychedelics. Within this broad concept, examination of morphological neuronal plasticity, such as dendritic arbor growth, is widely used to assess the neuroplasticity effects of classic and novel psychedelics. At the molecular level, it has been reported that...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
February 27, 2024
Ema Jugović, Marta Poyo Solanas, Beatrice De Gelder
2 citations
preprint
Traditionally, consciousness studies focus on domain general cognitive processes rather than on specific information reaching subjective awareness. The present study (N = 45) used visual masking and whole-body images to investigate whether the specific emotional expression as well as gender of the stimuli and of the participants impact awareness. Our results show that participants’ awareness...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
January 20, 2024
Aaron Kucyi, Nathan Anderson, Tiara Bounyarith et al.
2 citations
preprint
Mind-wandering is a frequent, daily mental activity, experienced in unique ways in each person. Yet neuroimaging evidence relating mind-wandering to brain activity, for example in the default mode network (DMN), has relied on population-rather than individual-based inferences due to limited within-individual sampling. Here, three densely-sampled individuals each reported hundreds of...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
January 16, 2024
Raquel Aparicio-Terrés, Samantha López-Mochales, Margarita Díaz-Andreu et al.
preprint
In electronic music events, the driving four-on-the-floor music appears pivotal for inducing altered states of consciousness (ASCs). While various physiological mechanisms link repetitive auditory stimuli to ASCs, entrainment—a brainwave synchronization through periodic external stimuli— has garnered primary focus. However, there are no studies systematically exploring the relationship between...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
December 29, 2023
Iván Mindlin, Rubén Herzog, Laouen Belloli et al.
7 citations
preprint
Disorders of consciousness (DoC) are a challenging and complex group of neurological conditions characterised by absent or impaired awareness. The current range of therapeutic options for DoC patients is limited, offering few non-invasive pharmacological alternatives. This situation has sprung a growing interest in the development of novel treatments, such as the proposal to study the efficacy...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
December 17, 2023
Abdelmoneim Eshra, Noa Lipstein, Stefan Hallermann
1 citation
preprint
Ketamine produces rapid and sustained antidepressant effects after brief exposure to a single dose. Counterintuitively, while ketamine acts primarily as a blocker of postsynaptic N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors (NMDARs), increased signalling at glutamatergic synapses has been reported. Due to technical limitations, however, it remains unclear whether ketamine directly increases presynaptic...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
December 1, 2023
Anna Rusinova, Maria Volodina, Alexei Ossadtchi
preprint
Numerous studies have shown that meditation has a number of positive effects on the physical and psychological well-being of practitioners. As a result, meditation has become widely practiced not only as a religious practice but also as a self-regulation technique to achieve specific measurable goals. This raises the question of how quickly physiological changes can be noticed in individuals...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
November 7, 2023
Kelly E. Dunham, Kani H. Khaled, Leah Weizman et al.
preprint
Recently, the FDA approved microdosing ketamine for treatment resistant depression. Traditional antidepressants, like serotonin selective reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), block serotonin reuptake, but it is not clear if ketamine blocks serotonin reuptake. Here, we tested the effects of feeding ketamine and SSRIs to Drosophila melanogaster larvae, which has a similar serotonin system to mammals, and...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
October 25, 2023
Joel Frohlich, Ninette Simonian, Grant Hanada et al.
preprint
Stroboscopic or “flicker” stimulation is a form of periodic visual stimulation that induces geometric hallucinations through closed eyelids. While the visual effects of this form of sensory stimulation have received considerable attention, few studies have investigated the neural entrainment effects of periodic visual stimulation. Here, we introduce two variants of the classic flicker paradigm...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
August 8, 2023
Ruixiang Wang, Zeru Peterson, Nagalakshmi Balasubramanian et al.
1 citation
preprint
Schizophrenia is marked by poor social functioning that can have a severe impact on quality of life and independence, but the underlying neural circuity is not well understood. Here we used a translational model of subanesthetic ketamine in mice to delineate neural pathways in the brain linked to social deficits in schizophrenia. Mice treated with chronic ketamine (30 mg/kg/day for 10 days)...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
July 27, 2023
Paulina Clara Dagnino, Javier A. Galadí, Estela Càmara et al.
1 citation
preprint
Contemplative neuroscience has increasingly explored meditation using neuroimaging. However, the brain mechanisms underlying meditation remain elusive. Here, we implemented a causal mechanistic framework to explore the spatiotemporal dynamics of expert meditators during meditation and rest. We first applied a model-free approach by defining a probabilistic metastable substate (PMS) space for...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
July 13, 2023
Brian L Edlow, Mark Olchanyi, Holly J Freeman et al.
preprint
Consciousness is comprised of arousal (i.e., wakefulness) and awareness. Substantial progress has been made in mapping the cortical networks that modulate awareness in the human brain, but knowledge about the subcortical networks that sustain arousal is lacking. We integrated data from ex vivo diffusion MRI, immunohistochemistry, and in vivo 7 Tesla functional MRI to map the connectivity of a...
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,...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
June 19, 2023
Christiane Martins de Vasconcellos Silveira, Vanessa Farelo Dos Santos, Isis Moraes Ornelas et al.
preprint
Psychedelic compounds have gained renewed interest for their potential therapeutic applications, but their metabolism and effects on complex biological systems remain poorly understood. Here, we present a systematic characterization of LSD metabolites in the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans using state-of-the-art analytical techniques. By employing ultra-high performance liquid...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
June 3, 2023
Yue Hu, Wenjie Du, Jiangtao Qi et al.
1 citation
preprint
Ketamine (KET) and isoflurane (ISO) are two widely used general anesthetics, yet their distinct and shared neurophysiological mechanisms remain elusive. In this study, we conducted a comparative analysis of the effects of KET and ISO on c-Fos expression across the brain, utilizing hierarchical clustering and c-Fos-based functional network analysis to evaluate the responses of individual brain...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
May 16, 2023
Liya Ma, Nupur Katyare, Kevin Johnston et al.
preprint
Schizophrenia is known as a syndrome of dysconnection among brain regions. As a model for this syndrome, low doses of N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonists, such as ketamine, produce schizophrenia-like symptoms and cognitive deficits in healthy humans and animals. One of such deficits is impaired working memory, a process that engages an extended network of both frontal and parietal...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
April 18, 2023
Martin Breyton, Jan Fousek, Giovanni Rabuffo et al.
preprint
Signatures of consciousness are found in spectral and temporal properties of neuronal activity. Among these, spatiotemporal complexity after a perturbation has recently emerged as a robust metric to infer levels of consciousness. Perturbation paradigms remain, however, difficult to perform routinely. To discover alternative paradigms and metrics, we systematically explore brain stimulation and...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
April 12, 2023
Malika S. Datta, Yannan Chen, Shradha Chauhan et al.
6 citations
preprint
Ketamine is a multifunctional drug with clinical applications as an anesthetic, as a pain management medication and as a transformative fast-acting antidepressant. It is also abused as a recreational drug due to its dissociative property. Recent studies in rodents are revealing the neuronal mechanisms that mediate the complex actions of ketamine, however, its long-term impact due to prolonged...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
March 17, 2023
L. Paul Sands, Angela Jiang, Rachel E. Jones et al.
4 citations
preprint
How the human brain generates conscious phenomenal experience is a fundamental problem. In particular, it is unknown how variable and dynamic changes in subjective affect are driven by interactions with objective phenomena. We hypothesize a neurocomputational mechanism that generates valence-specific learning signals associated with ‘what it is like’ to be rewarded or punished. Our hypothesized...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
February 21, 2023
Naomi R. Driesen, Peter Herman, Margaret A. Rowland et al.
5 citations
preprint
Working memory (WM) is a crucial resource for temporary memory storage and the guiding of ongoing behavior. N-methyl-D-aspartate glutamate receptors (NMDARs) are thought to support the neural underpinnings of WM. Ketamine is an NMDAR antagonist that has cognitive and behavioral effects at subanesthetic doses. To shed light on subanesthetic ketamine effects on brain function, we employed a...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
February 5, 2023
Tom Froese, Natalya Weber, Ivan Shpurov et al.
6 citations
preprint
The theory of autopoiesis has been influential in many areas of theoretical biology, especially in the fields of artificial life and origins of life. However, it has not managed to productively connect with mainstream biology, partly for theoretical reasons, but arguably mainly because deriving specific working hypotheses has been challenging. The theory has recently undergone significant...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
February 5, 2023
Francis Kei Masuda, Yanjun Sun, Emily A Aery Jones et al.
2 citations
preprint
Ketamine, a rapid-acting anesthetic and acute antidepressant, carries undesirable spatial cognition side effects including out-of-body experiences and spatial memory impairments. The neural substrates that underlie these alterations in spatial cognition however, remain incompletely understood. Here, we used electrophysiology and calcium imaging to examine ketamine’s impacts on the medial...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
December 29, 2022
Marc Duque, Alex B. Chen, Eric Hsu et al.
1 citation
preprint
Mood-altering compounds hold promise for the treatment of many psychiatric disorders, such as depression, but connecting their molecular, circuit, and behavioral effects has been challenging. Here we find that, analogous to effects in rodent learned helplessness models, ketamine pre-exposure persistently suppresses futility-induced passivity in larval zebrafish. While antidepressants are...
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...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
September 27, 2022
Sruthi Susan Kuriakose, Aishwarya Swamy, Rahul Venugopal et al.
2 citations
preprint
Attaining proficiency in meditation is difficult, especially without feedback since the mind may be easily distracted with thoughts and only long term efforts see any impact. Self-regulation would be much more effective if provided real time assessment and this can be achieved through EEG neurofeedback. Therefore, this work proposes a scheme for assessing meditation-like state in real time from...