Summary: Conscious visual phenomenology comprises multiple representational levels, from basic features to integrated percepts, raising the question of how the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) differentiate accordingly. Event-related potential (ERP) studies identified early occipitotemporal negativities as reliable NCC; yet, it remains unclear whether these capture conscious content...
iScienceAugust 21, 2026Kaio 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...
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...
iScienceJuly 20, 2026Alba 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...
iScienceJuly 10, 2026Li Liping, Fang Xiaoxia, Zhang Huimin et al.
Tourette syndrome affects children's daily functioning and creates a need for supervised support that responds to tic behaviors, emotional states, and interaction contexts. We developed MindTS-MMD, a Chinese multimodal dataset capturing emotion, tic-related behaviors, interaction context, and Valence-Arousal ratings, and MindTS-Net, a supervised digital adjunct linking multimodal emotion...
iScienceJune 19, 2026Lukas 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,...
iScienceJune 19, 2026Chuang 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...
Summary Parkinson’s disease with mild cognitive impairment (PD-MCI) is a common non-motor manifestation that severely impairs functional independence and quality of life. A single-blind randomized controlled trial was conducted to evaluate whether mindfulness combined with cognitive-motor dual-task training (CMDT) improves multidimensional outcomes in patients with PD-MCI. Fifty three...
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.
iScienceJanuary 16, 2026Amir 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...
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...
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...
iScienceNovember 21, 2025Yuhua 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...
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...
Dreams incorporate recent experiences, and memory-related brain activity is reactivated during sleep, suggesting that dreaming, memory consolidation, and reactivation are tightly linked. We devised a paradigm to investigate whether memory reprocessing during sleep contributes to dreaming. Participants listened to different audiobooks before falling asleep, introducing dissimilar experiences to...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...