Elife
April 21, 2026
Classical psychedelics induce complex visual hallucinations in humans, generating percepts that are coherent at a low level, but which have surreal, dream-like qualities at a high level. While there are many hypotheses as to how classical psychedelics could induce these effects, there are no concrete mechanistic models that capture the variety of observed effects in humans, while remaining...
Elife
March 31, 2026
Jessica L Maltman, Javier González-Maeso
Human neurons derived from stem cells show increased structural complexity and stronger synaptic connections after exposure to psilocin, the active metabolite of the psychedelic psilocybin.
Elife
March 27, 2026
Målin Schmidt, Anne Hoffrichter, Mahnaz Davoudi et al.
3 citations
Psilocybin is studied as innovative medication in anxiety, substance abuse and treatment-resistant depression. Animal studies show that psychedelics promote neuronal plasticity by strengthening synaptic responses and protein synthesis. However, the exact molecular and cellular changes induced by psilocybin in the human brain are not known. Here, we treated human cortical neurons derived from...
Elife
January 13, 2026
Colin Bredenberg, Fabrice Normandin, Blake Richards et al.
Classical psychedelics induce complex visual hallucinations in humans, generating percepts that are coherent at a low level, but which have surreal, dream-like qualities at a high level. While there are many hypotheses as to how classical psychedelics could induce these effects, there are no concrete mechanistic models that capture the variety of observed effects in humans, while remaining...
Elife
January 13, 2026
François Stockart, Alexis Robin, Hal Blumenfeld et al.
Despite many years of research, the quest to identify neural correlates of perceptual consciousness (NCC) remains unresolved. One major obstacle lies in methodological limitations: most studies rely on non-invasive neural measures with limited spatial or temporal resolution making it difficult to disentangle proper NCCs from concurrent cognitive processes. Additionally, the relatively low...
Elife
October 13, 2025
Guylaine Hoffner, Pablo Castro, Lynn Uhrig et al.
The resting primate brain is traversed by spontaneous functional connectivity patterns that show striking differences between conscious and unconscious states. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a non-invasive neuromodulatory technique, can improve signs of consciousness in disorders of consciousness (DOCs); however, can it influence both conscious and unconscious dynamic...
Elife
August 21, 2025
In Fahrenfort et al., 2025 we show the influence of non-perceptual criterion shifts on neural measures of consciousness. We fully agree (and point out in our article) that it was already known that subjective measures are sensitive to criterion confounds, and we are happy to read that this is acknowledged by Sandberg and Overgaard in their comment (Sandberg and Overgaard, 2025). However, we...
Elife
July 18, 2025
Charles-Francois V Latchoumane, Joon-Hyuk Lee, Seong-Wook Kim et al.
Thalamocortical activity is known to orchestrate sensory gating and consciousness switching. The precise thalamic regions involved, or the firing patterns related to the unconsciousness, remain unclear. Interestingly, the highly -expressed thalamic T-type calcium currents have been considered as a candidate for the ionic mechanism for the generation of thalamocortically driven change in...
Elife
June 18, 2025
Samuel Noorman, Timo Stein, Jasper B. Zantvoord et al.
2 citations
Perceptual inference requires the integration of visual features through recurrent processing, the dynamic exchange of information between higher- and lower-level cortical regions. While animal research has demonstrated a crucial role of NMDA receptors in recurrent processing, establishing a causal link between NMDA receptors and recurrent processing in humans has remained challenging. Here, we...
Elife
May 28, 2025
Johannes Jacobus Fahrenfort, Philippa A. Johnson, Niels A. Kloosterman et al.
10 citations
How consciousness arises from brain activity has been a topic of intense scientific research for decades. But how does one identify the neural basis of something that is intrinsically personal and subjective? A hallmark approach has been to ask human observers to judge stimuli as 'seen' (conscious) and 'unseen' (unconscious) and use post hoc sorting of neural measurements based these judgments....
Elife
May 28, 2025
Ling Liu
Cautious reporting choices can artificially enhance how well analyses of brain activity reflect conscious and unconscious experiences, making distinguishing between the two more challenging.
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...
Elife
May 19, 2025
Makaela Nartker, Chaz Firestone, Howard Egeth et al.
9 citations
The relation between attention, perception, and awareness is among the most fundamental problems in the science of the mind. One of the most striking and well-known phenomena bearing on this question is inattentional blindness (IB). In IB, naive observers fail to report clearly visible stimuli when their attention is otherwise engaged-famously missing a gorilla parading before their eyes. IB...
Elife
May 15, 2025
Tudor M. Ionescu, Mario Amend, Rakibul Hafiz et al.
1 citation
Understanding the complex workings of the brain is one of the most significant challenges in neuroscience, providing insights into normal brain function, neurological diseases, and the effects of potential therapeutics. A major challenge in this field lies in the limitations of traditional brain imaging techniques, which often capture only fragments of the complex puzzle of brain function. Our...
Elife
July 18, 2024
Andrea I. Luppi, Pedro A. M. Mediano, Fernando E. Rosas et al.
49 citations
How is the information-processing architecture of the human brain organised, and how does its organisation support consciousness? Here, we combine network science and a rigorous information-theoretic notion of synergy to delineate a 'synergistic global workspace', comprising gateway regions that gather synergistic information from specialised modules across the human brain. This information is...
Elife
May 3, 2024
Mariann Oemisch, Hyojung Seo
The discovery of rapid-acting antidepressant, ketamine has opened a pathway to a new generation of treatments for depression, and inspired neuroscientific investigation based on a new perspective that non-adaptive changes in the intrinsic excitatory and inhibitory circuitry might underlie the pathophysiology of depression. Nevertheless, it still remains largely unknown how the hypothesized...
Elife
April 17, 2024
Flora Moujaes, Jie Lisa Ji, Masih Rahmati et al.
23 citations
Ketamine has emerged as one of the most promising therapies for treatment-resistant depression. However, inter-individual variability in response to ketamine is still not well understood and it is unclear how ketamine's molecular mechanisms connect to its neural and behavioral effects. We conducted a single-blind placebo-controlled study, with participants blinded to their treatment condition....
Elife
March 21, 2024
Yue Hu, Wenjie Du, Jiangtao Qi et al.
27 citations
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 mouse brain, utilizing hierarchical clustering and c-Fos-based functional network analysis to evaluate the responses of individual...
Elife
January 24, 2024
Zepeng Fang, Yuanyuan Dang, Zhipei Ling et al.
16 citations
Exploring the neural mechanisms of awareness is a fundamental task of cognitive neuroscience. There is an ongoing dispute regarding the role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in the emergence of awareness, which is partially raised by the confound between report- and awareness-related activity. To address this problem, we designed a visual awareness task that can minimize report-related motor...
Elife
January 5, 2024
Daniel Toker, Eli J Müller, Hiroyuki Miyamoto et al.
21 citations
Consciousness is thought to be regulated by bidirectional information transfer between the cortex and thalamus, but the nature of this bidirectional communication - and its possible disruption in unconsciousness - remains poorly understood. Here, we present two main findings elucidating mechanisms of corticothalamic information transfer during conscious states. First, we identify a highly...
Elife
July 12, 2021
Joshua B. Burt, Katrin H. Preller, Murat Demirtaş et al.
49 citations
Psychoactive drugs can transiently perturb brain physiology while preserving brain structure. The role of physiological state in shaping neural function can therefore be investigated through neuroimaging of pharmacologically induced effects. Previously, using pharmacological neuroimaging, we found that neural and experiential effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) are attributable to...
Elife
May 5, 2021
Moti Salti, Simo Monto, Lucie Charles et al.
The neural correlates of consciousness are typically sought by comparing the overall brain responses to perceived and unperceived stimuli. However, this comparison may be contaminated by non-specific attention, alerting, performance, and reporting confounds. Here, we pursue a novel approach, tracking the neuronal coding of consciously and unconsciously perceived contents while keeping behavior...
Elife
March 2, 2021
Balázs Szigeti, Laura Kärtner, Allan Blemings et al.
192 citations
Microdosing is the practice of regularly using low doses of psychedelic drugs. Anecdotal reports suggest that microdosing enhances well-being and cognition; however, such accounts are potentially biased by the placebo effect. This study used a 'self-blinding' citizen science initiative, where participants were given online instructions on how to incorporate placebo control into their...
Elife
March 2, 2021
Lindsay P. Cameron
5 citations
A citizen science approach to research has shown that the improvements in mood and cognition associated with psychedelic microdosing are likely due to a placebo effect.
Elife
November 11, 2020
Janis Karan Hesse, Doris Y Tsao
A powerful paradigm to identify neural correlates of consciousness is binocular rivalry, wherein a constant visual stimulus evokes a varying conscious percept. It has recently been suggested that activity modulations observed during rivalry may represent the act of report rather than the conscious percept itself. Here, we performed single-unit recordings from face patches in macaque...