Journal of Neuroscience
January 22, 2014
Lucie Charles, Jean-Rémi King, Stanislas Dehaene
How do we detect our own errors, even before we receive any external feedback? One model hypothesizes that error detection results from the confrontation of two signals: a fast and unconscious motor code, based on a direct sensory-motor pathway; and a slower conscious intention code that computes the required response given the stimulus and task instructions. To test this theory and assess how...
Journal of Neuroscience
January 8, 2014
Peter J. Hellyer, Murray Shanahan, Gregory Scott et al.
225 citations
Understanding how dynamic changes in brain activity control behavior is a major challenge of cognitive neuroscience. Here, we consider the brain as a complex dynamic system and define two measures of brain dynamics: the synchrony of brain activity, measured by the spatial coherence of the BOLD signal across regions of the brain; and metastability, which we define as the extent to which...
Journal of Neuroscience
September 18, 2013
Matthew J. Brookes, David Errtizoe, Ben Sessa et al.
501 citations
Psychedelic drugs produce profound changes in consciousness, but the underlying neurobiological mechanisms for this remain unclear. Spontaneous and induced oscillatory activity was recorded in healthy human participants with magnetoencephalography after intravenous infusion of psilocybin—prodrug of the nonselective serotonin 2A receptor agonist and classic psychedelic psilocin. Psilocybin...
Journal of Neuroscience
June 19, 2013
Michael Kometer, André Schmidt, Lutz Jäncke et al.
357 citations
Visual illusions and hallucinations are hallmarks of serotonergic hallucinogen-induced altered states of consciousness. Although the serotonergic hallucinogen psilocybin activates multiple serotonin (5-HT) receptors, recent evidence suggests that activation of 5-HT2A receptors may lead to the formation of visual hallucinations by increasing cortical excitability and altering visual-evoked...
Journal of Neuroscience
January 16, 2013
Terrell Holloway, José L. Moreno, Adrienne Umali et al.
122 citations
It has been suggested that severe adverse life events during pregnancy increase the risk of schizophrenia in the offspring. The serotonin 5-HT 2A and the metabotropic glutamate 2 (mGlu2) receptors both have been the target of considerable attention regarding schizophrenia and antipsychotic drug development. We tested the effects of maternal variable stress during pregnancy on expression and...
Journal of Neuroscience
November 1, 2012
Benjamin J Levy, Michael C Anderson
Understanding the neural basis of conscious experience and its regulation are fundamental goals of science. While recent research has made substantial progress in identifying the neural correlates of conscious experiences, it remains unclear how individuals exert control over the contents of awareness. In particular, can a memory that has entered the aware state be purged from consciousness if...
Journal of Neuroscience
October 31, 2012
Micah Allen, Martin Dietz, Karina S. Blair et al.
389 citations
Mindfulness meditation is a set of attention-based, regulatory, and self-inquiry training regimes. Although the impact of mindfulness training (MT) on self-regulation is well established, the neural mechanisms supporting such plasticity are poorly understood. MT is thought to act through interoceptive salience and attentional control mechanisms, but until now conflicting evidence from...
Journal of Neuroscience
October 24, 2012
Jaan Aru, Nikolai Axmacher, Anne T A Do Lam et al.
Which neural processes underlie our conscious experience? One theoretical view argues that the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) reside in local activity in sensory cortices. Accordingly, local category-specific gamma band responses in visual cortex correlate with conscious perception. However, as most studies manipulated conscious perception by altering the amount of sensory evidence,...
Journal of Neuroscience
October 3, 2012
Miriam Kron, C James Howell, Ian T Adams et al.
Excitatory-inhibitory imbalance has been identified within specific brain microcircuits in models of Rett syndrome (RTT) and other autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). However, macrocircuit dysfunction across the RTT brain as a whole has not been defined. To approach this issue, we mapped expression of the activity-dependent, immediate-early gene product Fos in the brains of wild-type (Wt) and...
Journal of Neuroscience
April 11, 2012
Giuseppe Pagnoni
Neuroimaging data suggest a link between the spontaneous production of thoughts during wakeful rest and slow fluctuations of activity in the default mode network (DMN), a set of brain regions with high basal metabolism and a major neural hub in the ventral posteromedial cortex (vPMC). Meta-awareness and regulation of mind-wandering are core cognitive components of most contemplative practices...
Journal of Neuroscience
April 4, 2012
Jaakko Långsjö, Michael Alkire, Kimmo Kaskinoro et al.
One of the greatest challenges of modern neuroscience is to discover the neural mechanisms of consciousness and to explain how they produce the conscious state. We sought the underlying neural substrate of human consciousness by manipulating the level of consciousness in volunteers with anesthetic agents and visualizing the resultant changes in brain activity using regional cerebral blood flow...
Journal of Neuroscience
March 7, 2012
Gustavo Deco, Viktor Jirsa
778 citations
The ongoing activity of the brain at rest, i.e., under no stimulation and in absence of any task, is astonishingly highly structured into spatiotemporal patterns. These spatiotemporal patterns, called resting state networks, display low-frequency characteristics (<0.1 Hz) observed typically in the BOLD-fMRI signal of human subjects. We aim here to understand the origins of resting state...
Journal of Neuroscience
February 29, 2012
Jesse Wood, Yunbok Kim, Bita Moghaddam
164 citations
In the absence of overt cellular pathology but profound perceptual disorganization and cognitive deficits, schizophrenia is increasingly considered a disorder of neural coordination. Thus, different causal factors can similarly interrupt the dynamic function of neuronal ensembles and networks, in particular in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), leading to behavioral disorganization. The importance of...
Journal of Neuroscience
December 7, 2011
George R King, Thomas Ernst, Weiran Deng et al.
Cannabis is the most abused illegal substance in the United States. Alterations in brain function and motor behavior have been reported in chronic cannabis users, but the results have been variable. The current study aimed to determine whether chronic active cannabis use in humans may alter psychomotor function, brain activation, and hypothalamic-pituitary-axis (HPA) function in men and women....
Journal of Neuroscience
November 23, 2011
Benjamin Di Cara, Roberto Maggio, Gabriella Aloisi et al.
97 citations
“Ecstasy” [3,4-methylenedioxymetamphetamine (MDMA)] is of considerable interest in light of its prosocial properties and risks associated with widespread recreational use. Recently, it was found to bind trace amine-1 receptors (TA 1 Rs), which modulate dopaminergic transmission. Accordingly, using mice genetically deprived of TA 1 R ( TA 1 -KO ), we explored their significance to the actions of...
Journal of Neuroscience
November 16, 2011
Alfredo Brancucci, Raffaella Franciotti, Anita D'Anselmo et al.
The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC), i.e., patterns of brain activity that specifically accompany a particular conscious experience, have been investigated mainly in the visual system using particularly suited paradigms, such as binocular rivalry and multistable percepts in combination with neural recordings or neuroimaging. Through the same principles, we look here for possible NCC in...
Journal of Neuroscience
October 26, 2011
Michal T Kucewicz, Mark D. Tricklebank, Rafał Bogacz et al.
Coordinated activity spanning anatomically distributed neuronal networks underpins cognition and mediates limbic-cortical interactions during learning, memory, and decision-making. We used CP55940, a potent agonist of brain cannabinoid receptors known to disrupt coordinated activity in hippocampus, to investigate the roles of network oscillations during hippocampal and medial prefrontal...
Journal of Neuroscience
October 5, 2011
Daisuke H. Tanaka, Kazuya Toriumi, Ken-ichiro Kubo et al.
Phencyclidine (PCP) is a noncompetitive NMDA receptor antagonist, and it induces schizophreniform cognitive deficits in healthy humans and similar cognitive deficits in rodents. Although the PCP-induced cognitive deficits appear to be accompanied and possibly caused by dysfunction of GABAergic inhibitory interneurons in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the potential benefit(s) of GABAergic...
Journal of Neuroscience
September 21, 2011
Min-Suk Kang, Randolph Blake, Geoffrey Forrest Woodman
99 citations
It has been intensely debated whether visual stimuli are processed to the point of semantic analysis in the absence of awareness. In the present study, we measured the extent to which the meaning of a stimulus was registered using the N400 component of human event-related potentials (ERPs), a highly sensitive index of the semantic mismatch between a stimulus and the context in which it is...
Journal of Neuroscience
September 7, 2011
Tim V Salomons, Aaron Kucyi
25 citations
The neuroscience of meditative practice has attracted considerable attention, in part because it represents a unique juxtaposition of Western scientific practice and Eastern mystical tradition. Beyond cultural interest, however, lies the question of whether such study has clinical/therapeutic
Journal of Neuroscience
August 10, 2011
Andrew L. Ko, Felix Darvas, Andrew V. Poliakov et al.
63 citations
The study of human brain electrophysiology has extended beyond traditional frequency ranges identified by the classical EEG rhythms, encompassing both higher and lower frequencies. Changes in high-gamma-band (>70 Hz) power have been identified as markers of local cortical activity. Fluctuations at infra-slow (<0.1 Hz) frequencies have been associated with functionally significant cortical...
Journal of Neuroscience
August 10, 2011
Samuel A Neymotin, Maciej T Lazarewicz, Mohamed Sherif et al.
Abnormalities in oscillations have been suggested to play a role in schizophrenia. We studied theta-modulated gamma oscillations in a computer model of hippocampal CA3 in vivo with and without simulated application of ketamine, an NMDA receptor antagonist and psychotomimetic. Networks of 1200 multicompartment neurons [pyramidal, basket, and oriens-lacunosum moleculare (OLM) cells] generated...
Journal of Neuroscience
July 6, 2011
Tessa M. van Leeuwen, Hanneke E.m. den Ouden, Peter Hagoort
158 citations
Synesthesia provides an elegant model to investigate neural mechanisms underlying individual differences in subjective experience in humans. In grapheme-color synesthesia, written letters induce color sensations, accompanied by activation of color area V4. Competing hypotheses suggest that enhanced V4 activity during synesthesia is either induced by direct bottom-up cross-activation from...
Journal of Neuroscience
May 11, 2011
Philippe Huot, Tom H. Johnston, Katie D. Lewis et al.
83 citations
l -3,4-Dihydroxyphenylalanine ( l -DOPA) is the most effective treatment for Parkinson's disease, but long-term l -DOPA administration is marred by the emergence of motor complications, namely, dyskinesia and a shortening of antiparkinsonian benefit (wearing-OFF). 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) is unique in that it exerts antidyskinetic effects and may enhance antiparkinsonian actions...
Journal of Neuroscience
May 4, 2011
Cristina Marzano, Michele Ferrara, Federica Mauro et al.
Under the assumption that dream recall is a peculiar form of declarative memory, we have hypothesized that (1) the encoding of dream contents during sleep should share some electrophysiological mechanisms with the encoding of episodic memories of the awake brain and (2) recalling a dream(s) after awakening from non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep should be...