Neuroscience of Consciousness
September 2, 2026
Yarin Szachter, Almog Simchon, D. Kalev et al.
Abstract Sense of Agency (SoA), the subjective experience of initiating and controlling one’s actions, is a critical component of self-perception and consciousness, and is often degraded in different psychopathologies. Individuals with dissociation seem to have diminished SoA, but it is yet unknown whether this affects communication with their surroundings. This study employs Natural Language...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
August 26, 2026
H. Sid-Ahmed, J. Alayrangues, L. Langar et al.
Abstract Hypnosis is increasingly used in a medical context. However, the hypnotic process is dynamic, and we currently lack specific and reliable biomarkers to diagnose and rigorously monitor the patient’s response to hypnotic suggestions. Here, we aimed to identify physiological biomarkers by investigating cerebral event-related responses in an oddball paradigm using a...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
August 14, 2026
Marina Leggieri, Borriero Alessio, Ciorli Tommaso et al.
Abstract Gender identity plays a crucial role in how we come to feel our bodies as our own. When the inner sense of gender does not align with bodily appearance, the resulting tension can shape both conscious and pre-reflective aspects of embodiment. In this study, we examined how gendered self-representations influence bodily self-consciousness using the Full-Body Illusion in immersive virtual...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
July 30, 2026
T. Ciorli, O. MacGregor, Martin Nilsson et al.
Abstract Self-related cues, most notably one’s own face, are highly salient and confer processing advantages at both conscious and unconscious levels. Whether such self-related information and stimulus salience modulate the earliest electroencephalography (EEG) correlate of visual awareness, the visual awareness negativity (VAN), remains unknown. In this study, we examined whether self-related...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
July 29, 2026
Yukiko Tsuji, Miyuki Azuma, Camille Lépingle et al.
Abstract The rubber hand illusion (RHI) provides a powerful paradigm for probing the malleability of bodily self-consciousness. While conventional studies rely on proprioceptive drift, questionnaires, or averaged neural measures, phenomenological research suggests that the RHI unfolds through multiple subjective state transitions rather than as a simple binary phenomenon. Participants often...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
January 17, 2026
Sergio Ponce de Leon, Jeff Yoshimi
Abstract Integrated information theory (IIT) makes two predictions about the role of inactive neurons in consciousness. According to the silent brain (SB) prediction, rendering all active neurons inactive (“silent”) in the physical substrate of consciousness (the “main complex”) does not eliminate the presence of consciousness, because the neurons are still able to spike. According to the...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
January 17, 2026
Claudia Passos-Ferreira, David J. Chalmers
Abstract We surveyed attendees at two leading conferences on consciousness, asking for their views on central issues concerning infant consciousness. These include questions about whether newborns are conscious, when consciousness and self-consciousness emerge, where in the brain the neural basis of infant consciousness is found, what sorts of consciousness infants may have, and how best to...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Kiana Ward
1 citation
Non-dual awareness (NDA) refers to a shift in consciousness in which the usual distinction between subject and object dissolves, and experience is no longer structured by conceptual mediation or goal-directed regulation. Meling enactivist model describes NDA as a meditative disclosure of groundlessness-the recognition of emptiness (śūnyatā), that all phenomena lack intrinsic nature. While...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Alicia Franco-Martínez, Ricardo Rey-Sáez, Jesús Adrián-ventura et al.
1 citation
Although in recent years some studies have found evidence suggesting that working memory (WM) may operate on unconscious perceptual contents, decisive demonstrations of the existence of unconscious WM are lacking. In the present Registered Report, we replicate the first study on this topic by Soto et al. (Working memory without consciousness. Curr Biol 2011;21:R912-3.): a visual discrimination...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Juliette Gélébart, Alexandre Fouré, Romain Quentin et al.
Hypnotic induction and ideomotor suggestions provide a powerful framework for investigating the remarkable capacity of verbal influence to reshape conscious experience, cognition, and motor control. We employed a multimodal, neurophenomenological approach combining high-density electroencephalography, cardiorespiratory, and behavioral monitoring, as well as first-person reports across three...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Sneha K S Sheth, Mike Doswell, Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva et al.
The pursuit of a scientific theory of consciousness has gained momentum in neuroscience over the past 25 years. While much research has centered on perceptual consciousness, the dynamic experience of the stream of thought, proposed by William James over a century ago, has remained relatively underexplored. The Dynamic Framework of Thought (DFT) introduced a taxonomy of thought dynamics,...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Ronald Sladky
Current theories of consciousness often emphasize its ego-centric functions, highlighting the role of the insular cortex in interoceptive self-modeling and subcortical brain regions in qualitative experience and motivation, aptly described as the 'hidden spring' of consciousness. From ecological and pragmatic perspectives, conscious experience may facilitate the self-organization of complex...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Jonas Mago, George Deane, Lars Sandved-Smith et al.
Under the influence of psychedelics, people often report encountering "entities" who seem to have their own autonomous agency. Depending on the cultural milieu, these entities are reported to take a variety of forms, including spirits, elves, ancestors, or fragments of the self. Encounters with such beings hold a central place in many traditions of psychedelic practice around the world. And...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Jonathan Lomax Boyd, Eric Allen Jensen, Aaron Michael Jensen et al.
Biological computers, or 'biocomputers', are being engineered with brain organoids integrated with in silico hardware and software components. This technology promises to advance our mechanistic understanding of cognitive processes by embodying in vitro neural systems within virtual learning environments. Yet, biocomputers raise ethical and moral questions, such as whether evidence of...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Vikas N O'Reilly-Shah, Alessandro Maria Selvitella, Aaron Schurger
The unfolding argument in the neuroscience of consciousness posits that causal structure cannot account for consciousness because any recurrent neural network (RNN) can be "unfolded" into a functionally equivalent feedforward neural network (FNN) with identical input-output behavior. Subsequent debate has focused on dynamical properties and philosophy of science critiques. We examine a boundary...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Annie G Bryant, Christopher J. Whyte
Identifying the neural correlates of conscious visual perception remains a major challenge in neuroscience, requiring theories that bridge between subjective experience and measurable neural correlates. However, theoretical interpretation of empirical evidence is often post hoc and susceptible to confirmation bias. Building upon the adversarial collaboration mediated by the COGITATE Consortium,...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Ralph Andrews, Paul M Dockree
Breathing, beyond its metabolic role, has been increasingly implicated in shaping perception, attention, and aspects of cognitive processing. Here, we propose the Rhythmic Embodied Perception (REP) Framework, a multi-level framework linking body and brain to explain how respiration structures conscious experience. At the neurophysiological level, slow respiratory cycles modulate cortical...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Zeynep Temel Başer, Gülsüm Uzer, Hansa Şentürk et al.
In this study, the Consciousness States Comparison Scale: REM Version (CSCS-REM) was developed as a self-report instrument to assess dream consciousness during REM sleep in comparison with waking consciousness. Existing instruments capture only limited aspects of phenomenology and provide few opportunities for systematic cross-state evaluation. By anchoring waking consciousness as a reference...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Stefano Palminteri, Charley M Wu
Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly become a central topic in AI and cognitive science, due to their unprecedented performance in a vast array of tasks. Indeed, some even see "sparks of artificial general intelligence" in their apparently boundless faculty for conversation and reasoning. Their sophisticated emergent faculties, which were not initially anticipated by their designers, have...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Silvana Lozito, Stefano Lasaponara, Jianghao Liu et al.
A recent study using intracerebral electroencephalography (EEG) recordings in human patients has documented the electrophysiological correlates of conscious reporting of near-threshold visual targets that followed supra-threshold peripheral spatial cues. Here, we aimed to bridge these intracerebral EEG events with corresponding surface recording, differentiating between conscious and...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Shogo Tanaka
This paper explores the fundamental challenges of machine consciousness in the era of Physical AI, where Large Language Models (LLMs) are integrated with humanoid platforms. While current systems like 'Ameca' exhibit sophisticated conversational abilities, they remain ungrounded discursive constructs operating within the realm of 'spoken speech' (parole parlée)-linguistic patterns detached from...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
María del Carmen Tejada, Antonia Zepeda, Alejandro Troncoso et al.
Empathy plays a fundamental role in social bonding and intersubjective understanding. While recent research has emphasized how bodily processes shape empathic engagement and underlie individual differences, the impact of bodily disruptions on empathic experience in Parkinson's disease (PD) remains largely unexplored. In this study, we used a neurophenomenological approach to investigate Empathy...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Lancelot da Costa, Anil K. Seth, Karl Friston et al.
Consciousness science faces the challenge of bridging first-person experience with third-person empirical measurements. Neurophenomenology aims to build such 'generative passages' connecting the content of experience with behavioural and neuroscientific data. However, the mathematical machinery for such bridges remains underdeveloped. Here we develop a Rosetta Stone hypothesis from predictive...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Asa Young, Marissa Ericson, Jonathan W. Schooler
Consciousness is often treated as a property of the brain alone, yet accumulating evidence suggests that it is shaped by a recurrent dialogue between the brain and body. In this review, we discuss how cognition associated with consciousness-processes that define the observer, their observations, and arising qualia-depend on structured rhythmic correspondences between bodily rhythms and brain...
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...