iScience
August 21, 2026
Kaio Misawa, Koji Chinen, Akira Kawabata et al.
How does the brain organize neural information for perception during wakefulness, yet lose such organization under anesthesia? Theories on consciousness hypothesize that perceptual experience arises from global communication across the cerebral cortex. However, the neural substrate that mediates information transfer between cortical regions remains uncertain. Here, developing large-scale and...
iScience
August 21, 2026
Antje Peters, Merit Ohlsen, Jens Bölte et al.
Interacting with artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly prominent in everyday life. Modern AI can produce intelligent, witty, and even sarcastic responses, leading people to assume AI is conscious. This raises the question whether AI is perceived as conscious, and how people respond to such machines behaviorally and neurally. This preregistered electroencephalogram (EEG) study...
iScience
July 21, 2026
Social hierarchy shapes behavioral and transcriptional responses to chronic stress and ketamine in male mice.
iScience
July 20, 2026
Alba Gómez-Andrés, Toni Cunillera, David Cucurell et al.
Agency attribution refers to the ability to recognize ourselves as the authors of our actions and their consequences and is central to subjective experience and individual responsibility. Across three event-related potential (ERP) experiments, we characterized electrophysiological and oscillatory neural responses associated with agency prediction errors in healthy participants. Experiments 1...
iScience
July 10, 2026
MindTS-Net: A multimodal mindfulness-based intervention framework for children with Tourette syndrome.
iScience
June 19, 2026
Lukas Moebus, Manuel Spitschan, Felix Ehrlenspiel
Among all vital functions, breathing is uniquely under both autonomic and volitional control. This dual control enables conscious recognition and regulation of arousal. While breathwork affects arousal and relaxation, research rarely investigates the impact of specific parameters or individual differences. In a randomized crossover trial (N = 42), university students practiced three 5-min,...
iScience
June 19, 2026
Chuang Liang, Wenhao Jiang, Jiayu Chen et al.
Hemodialysis (HD) is the predominant treatment for end-stage renal disease (ESRD). Despite the efficacy of HD, the neurobiological underpinnings underlying high-risk complications remain unclear. In this study, using unsupervised fusion of functional and structural MRI, we identified a longitudinally altered default mode network (DMN)-insula pattern in ESRD receiving HD over 1-year follow-up (n...
iScience
April 15, 2026
Scheila Cristina Biazatti, Deborah Bambil, Rômulo Môra et al.
reflects morphological overlap. Confusion matrix and similarity network analyses showed only partial agreement with previous ethnobotanical classifications. Focusing on subtle variation within a single species, this study demonstrates that integrating traditional knowledge with machine learning enables automated validation of folk taxonomies.
iScience
February 21, 2026
Andrew Geoly, John P. Coetzee, Derrick Matthew Buchanan et al.
= 22). Longitudinal analyses assessed cortical thickness, subcortical volume, and predicted brain age (pBA), estimated from T1 scans. pBA was significantly reduced at 1 month relative to baseline (-1.3 years). Cortical thickness analysis revealed post-treatment increases in 11 regions. Subcortical analyses revealed significant volumetric expansion in 8 regions. Magnesium-ibogaine therapy was...
iScience
January 16, 2026
Amir Valizadeh, John D Roache, Xinyu Zhang et al.
2 citations
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) exhibits extensive clinical and biological variability, making treatment challenging. The Consortium to Alleviate PTSD (CAP)-ketamine trial, the largest randomized study of ketamine for PTSD, found no overall benefit of ketamine over placebo, underscoring the necessity to identify responsive subgroups. Using pre-treatment blood DNA methylation profiles and...
iScience
December 19, 2025
Antonio Pazienti, Mariel Müller, Conrado A Bosman et al.
Slow-wave activity (SWA) is a hallmark of the loss of consciousness in non-REM sleep and anesthesia. The mechanistic underpinnings of SWA, and its evolution when transitioning toward the conscious brain state is poorly understood. We address this topic by recording multi-area and laminar activity in posterior parietal (PPC) and primary visual (V1) cortices of mice spontaneously awakening from...
iScience
November 21, 2025
Caleb Liang, Wen-Hsiang Lin, Wei-Kai Liou et al.
Most studies in bodily self-consciousness were limited to the case of a single body. We performed VR experiments to test the hypothesis that it is possible for healthy subjects to experience the Double Body Effect-the experiential combination of double body ownership and double body-location. Under proprioceptive-vestibular and visual manipulations, participants wobbled involuntarily while...
iScience
November 21, 2025
Yuhua Yu, Quentin Raffaelli, Delaney Freveletti et al.
Human thoughts often arise unprompted, forming a stream of consciousness. Despite their ubiquity, it remains unknown how the brain supports unprompted thoughts as an integrated experience with rich content and dynamics. Applying latent state modeling to fMRI data collected while individuals spoke aloud their thoughts, we identified recurring brain states linked to moment-to-moment thought...
iScience
October 17, 2025
Renzo Comolatti, Matteo Grasso, Giulio Tononi
Time flows-or at least the time of our experience does. Can we provide an objective account of why the conscious present encompasses a succession of moments that slip from now to then-an account of why time feels flowing? Integrated Information Theory (IIT) aims to account for both the presence and quality of consciousness in objective, physical terms. Given a substrate's architecture and...
iScience
July 1, 2025
Pre-sleep experiences shape neural activity and dream content in the sleeping brain.
iScience
June 20, 2025
Michelle K Piazza, Abigael R Weit, Ege T Kavalali et al.
2 citations
Ketamine induces antidepressant action via upregulation of hippocampal brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) expression and TrkB receptor signaling. Rett syndrome (RTT), a neurodevelopmental disorder caused by mutations in Methyl-CpG-binding protein 2 (MECP2), is associated with decreased BDNF expression. Although treatment with ketamine or LM22A-4, a TrkB receptor agonist, improves...
iScience
May 16, 2025
Shouyi Chen, Liurong Lin, Qian Zhou et al.
2 citations
Choking cough during awakening from anesthesia is common (15%-94%) and can cause severe discomfort and complications, especially in neck surgery. This study compared the median effective concentration (EC50) of remifentanil combined with esketamine versus remifentanil alone for suppressing cough during extubation in male patients undergoing anterior cervical spine surgery. Group E received 0.25...
iScience
March 21, 2025
Genji Kawakita, Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston, Ken Takeda et al.
Whether one person's subjective experience of the "redness" of red is equivalent to another's is a fundamental question in consciousness studies. Intersubjective comparison of the relational structures of sensory experiences, termed "qualia structures", can constrain the question. We propose an unsupervised alignment method, based on optimal transport, to find the optimal mapping between the...
iScience
January 17, 2025
Paolo Cardone, Arthur Bonhomme, Vincent Bonhomme et al.
9 citations
Post-comatose disorders of consciousness (DoC) represent persistent neurological conditions with limited therapeutic options and a poor prognosis. Recent works advocate for exploring the effects of psychedelics to enhance brain complexity in DoC and ameliorate their consciousness. We investigated sub-anesthetic concentration of the atypical psychedelic ketamine for treating post-comatose...
iScience
November 15, 2024
Lei Xie, Zelin Zhuang, Baowen Guo et al.
5 citations
The microbiota-gut-brain axis (MGBA) plays a pivotal role in drug addiction. However, the pathophysiological mechanism of MGBA in ketamine addiction remains elusive. The present study investigated the ketamine-induced gut microbiota disorders, intestinal barrier dysfunction, and the alterations in brain function, using a conditioned place preference (CPP) model of ketamine addiction in rats....
iScience
May 19, 2024
Andres Ort, John W Smallridge, Erich Seifritz et al.
1 citation
Serotonergic psychedelics hold promise as a treatment modality for various psychiatric disorders and are currently applied in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. We investigated the learning effects of the serotonin receptor agonist psilocybin in a probabilistic cue-reward task with emotional cues in the form of neutral or fearful faces, presented either consciously or subconsciously. This...
iScience
May 17, 2024
Lluis Miquel-Rio, Unai Sarriés-Serrano, María Sancho-Alonso et al.
16 citations
Depression is a devastating mood disorder that causes significant disability worldwide. Current knowledge of its pathophysiology remains modest and clear biological markers are lacking. Emerging evidence from human and animal models reveals persistent alterations in endoplasmic reticulum (ER) homeostasis, suggesting that ER stress-related signaling pathways may be targets for prevention and...
iScience
April 9, 2024
Ram Harari, Ipsita Chatterjee, Dmitriy Getselter et al.
20 citations
Psilocybin, and its metabolite psilocin, induces psychedelic effects through activation of the 5-HT2A receptor. Psilocybin has been proposed as a treatment for depression and anxiety but sometimes induces anxiety in humans. An understanding of mechanisms underlying the anxiety response will help to better develop therapeutic prospects of psychedelics. In the current study, psilocybin induced an...
iScience
March 28, 2024
José Alexandre Salerno, Stevens K. Rehen
4 citations
Psychedelics, recognized for their impact on perception, are resurging as promising treatments with rapid onset for mood and substance use disorders. Despite increasing evidence from clinical trials, questions persist about the cellular and molecular mechanisms and their precise correlation with treatment outcomes. Murine neurons and immortalized non-neural cell lines harboring overexpressed...
iScience
January 19, 2024
Hsin-Ping Wu, Estelle Nakul, Sophie Betka et al.
9 citations
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are characterized by the subjective feeling of being located outside one's physical body and perceiving one's own body from an elevated perspective looking downwards. OBEs have been correlated with abnormal integration of bodily signals, including visual and vestibular information. In two studies, we used mixed reality combined with a motion platform to manipulate...