PLoS Biology
July 6, 2026
Maëlan Q. Menétrey, Michael H Herzog, David Pascucci
In some forms of postdictive phenomena, later events influence the perception of earlier ones, suggesting that conscious perception may be preceded by extended periods of unconscious processing. An example is the Sequential Metacontrast (SQM) paradigm, in which vernier offsets are unconsciously integrated over several hundred milliseconds before conscious perception. Obviously, the integrated...
PLoS Biology
March 1, 2026
Adriana Michalak, Davide Marzoli, Francesco Pietrogiacomi et al.
Perceived sleep depth is a key determinant of subjective sleep quality, traditionally thought to reflect unconsciousness and reduced cortical activation. Here, we combined high-density EEG with a serial awakening paradigm during NREM2 (N2) sleep in healthy human participants to examine its neural and experiential correlates. As expected, deeper sleep was associated with reduced cortical...
PLoS Biology
October 1, 2025
Michele Angelo Colombo, Jacopo Favaro, Ezequiel Mikulan et al.
7 citations
Hemispherotomy is a neurosurgical procedure for treating refractory epilepsy, which entails disconnecting a significant portion of the cortex, potentially encompassing an entire hemisphere, from its cortical and subcortical connections. While this intervention prevents the spread of seizures, it raises important questions. Given the complete isolation from sensory-motor pathways, it remains...
PLoS Biology
July 1, 2025
Angus Leung, Ahmed A Mahmoud, Travis Jeans et al.
3 citations
The neural mechanisms of consciousness remain elusive. Previous studies on both human and non-human animals, through manipulation of level of conscious arousal, have reported that specific time-series features correlate with level of consciousness, such as spectral power in certain frequency bands. However, such features often lack principled, theoretical justifications as to why they should be...
PLoS Biology
July 1, 2025
Simon van Gaal
1 citation
Several neuronal markers have been proposed to differentiate the global brain states that underly states of consciousness. A new pre-registered study in PLOS Biology compares neural markers of loss of consciousness in flies when awake, asleep, and anesthetized.
PLoS Biology
May 1, 2021
Timo Stein, Daniel Kaiser, Johannes J Fahrenfort et al.
The study of unconscious processing requires a measure of conscious awareness. Awareness measures can be either subjective (based on participant's report) or objective (based on perceptual performance). The preferred awareness measure depends on the theoretical position about consciousness and may influence conclusions about the extent of unconscious processing and about the neural correlates...
PLoS Biology
February 1, 2019
M. Kohda, Takashi Hotta, Tomohiro Takeyama et al.
The ability to perceive and recognise a reflected mirror image as self (mirror self-recognition, MSR) is considered a hallmark of cognition across species. Although MSR has been reported in mammals and birds, it is not known to occur in any other major taxon. Potentially limiting our ability to test for MSR in other taxa is that the established assay, the mark test, requires that animals...
PLoS Biology
June 15, 2016
Stanislas Dehaene, Jean-Pierre Changeux
Even in the absence of sensory inputs, cortical and thalamic neurons can show structured patterns of ongoing spontaneous activity, whose origins and functional significance are not well understood. We use computer simulations to explore the conditions under which spontaneous activity emerges from a simplified model of multiple interconnected thalamocortical columns linked by long-range,...
PLoS Biology
July 9, 2015
Xavier Viñals, Estefanía Moreno, Laurence Lanfumey et al.
211 citations
Activation of cannabinoid CB1 receptors (CB1R) by delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) produces a variety of negative effects with major consequences in cannabis users that constitute important drawbacks for the use of cannabinoids as therapeutic agents. For this reason, there is a tremendous medical interest in harnessing the beneficial effects of THC. Behavioral studies carried out in mice...
PLoS Biology
January 27, 2015
David Nutt
66 citations
The United Nations drug control conventions of 1960 and 1971 and later additions have inadvertently resulted in perhaps the greatest restrictions of medical and life sciences research. These conventions now need to be revised to allow neuroscience to progress unimpeded and to assist in the innovation of treatments for brain disorders. In the meantime, local changes, such as the United Kingdom...
PLoS Biology
September 25, 2007
Antoine del Cul, S. Baillet, S. Dehaene
When a flashed stimulus is followed by a backward mask, subjects fail to perceive it unless the target-mask interval exceeds a threshold duration of about 50 ms. Models of conscious access postulate that this threshold is associated with the time needed to establish sustained activity in recurrent cortical loops, but the brain areas involved and their timing remain debated. We used high-density...
PLoS Biology
May 4, 2007
Heleen A. Slagter, Antoine Lutz, Lawrence L. Greischar et al.
762 citations
The information processing capacity of the human mind is limited, as is evidenced by the so-called "attentional-blink" deficit: When two targets (T1 and T2) embedded in a rapid stream of events are presented in close temporal proximity, the second target is often not seen. This deficit is believed to result from competition between the two targets for limited attentional resources. Here we...