ISSN 2632-1297
23 papers in the library · 113 citations · publishing 2021-2026
Brain Communications September 29, 2026 Jorge Andrés Delgado‐Ron
Jorge A Delgado-Ron; Reappraising the claims of evolutionary continuity between thanatosis and near-death experiences, Brain Communications, , fcag368, htt
Brain Communications September 11, 2026 Alexis Demas
What Kafka's Metamorphosis reveals about consciousness without communication Gregor Samsa awakens transformed. His body has become unrecognizable, his movements incoherent and his voice unintelligible. Yet nothing in his inner life appears altered. He thinks clearly, remembers precisely and understands his situation with painful lucidity. From the opening lines of The Metamorphosis,...
Brain Communications September 3, 2026 Desirée Conti, Tommaso Accinni, Alice Teghil et al.
Abstract Visual awareness includes the ability to distinguish internally generated sensory experience from veridical percepts derived from the external world. Visual hallucinations (VH) are an example of internally generated experience with important clinical implications and are common in Lewy body disease (LBD), with some patients aware of their hallucinations and others not. The awareness...
Brain Communications 2026 Raina Vin, Jordan A. Galbraith, Rashina D. Seabury et al.
Emerging evidence suggests that hallucinations may arise because of an over-reliance on prior knowledge during perception. While best established in psychosis-spectrum illness, data also support the presence of this abnormality in other hallucination-prone neuropsychiatric illnesses that vary in their association with disruption of sensory circuits. In this piece, we ask whether an...
Brain Communications 2026 Tobias Bauer, Charlotte Gauvry, Sebastian Markett et al.
Hemispherotomy is a surgical intervention for severe drug-resistant epilepsy that fully disconnects the lesional brain hemisphere from the rest of the nervous system. This creates a rare opportunity to explore whether consciousness can be sustained without external input. The default-mode network, linked to introspective mental activity, is considered a necessary, though not sufficient,...
Brain Communications 2026 Dorottya Szocs, Dian Lyu, Andrea I. Luppi et al.
Currently, there is substantial ongoing discussion around the functional role of the thalamus in consciousness. What is missing in the literature, however, is a systematic investigation of the relevance of specific thalamic nuclei in pharmacologically and pathologically altered states of consciousness in humans. Using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging in both healthy...
Brain Communications 2026 Aidan Hurst, Victoria M Bajo
N,N-Diisopropyltryptamine (DiPT) is a frequency-selective pitch-distorting psychedelic drug that induces a downward shift in perception where the auditory world of the subject sounds lower in pitch than in a sober state of consciousness. Hurst and Bajo propose the neural mechanisms for this effect and its use as potential therapeutic for tinnitus.
Brain Communications 2026 Ying Wang, Chenglong Cao, Hao Chen et al.
Microvascular decompression is the standard surgical intervention for classical trigeminal neuralgia attributed to NVC. However, up to 30% of patients experience poor outcomes despite technically successful surgery, suggesting non-peripheral mechanisms. This study investigates whether central neural reorganization-manifested as altered cortico-subcortical connectivity and white matter...
Brain Communications 2026 Sven Stuiver, Prejaas K.b. Tewarie, Julia C M Pottkämper et al.
The mechanisms underlying recovery of consciousness after its transient loss remain incompletely understood. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) induced generalized seizures disrupt responsiveness and orientation-key functional dimensions related to consciousness-and are followed by a stereotyped postictal state of temporary unresponsiveness, offering a unique model to study the dynamics of...
Brain Communications 2025 Eugénie Cataldo, Eda Tipura, Corrado Corradi-Dell'Acqua et al. 4 citations
Self-awareness can be impaired in different forms, including bodily features, following brain lesions. Such as other complex symptoms, these disorders seem not being localized in one brain area but may occur following the impairment of different parts of a network. One of the most disrupting body awareness disorder for people's functioning is the feeling that one or more body parts do not...
Brain Communications 2025 Christos Ganos, Michael A Ferguson, Kurt Gray et al.
Religion is a widespread feature of human life. Religions typically include both distinctive varieties of experience and also a set of foundational beliefs. An additional, but often overlooked, part of many religions is their expression through specific actions, which we here designate religious motor behaviours. Here we describe these religious motor behaviours and offer a taxonomy based on...
Brain Communications 2025 Mikki Schantell, Mia C Lulli, Kellen M McDonald et al.
The main psychoactive component in cannabis-Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol-is known to have anti-inflammatory properties and to alter gamma oscillations, pointing to its potential as a therapeutic agent for people with HIV (PWH). However, it remains unknown how cannabis use among PWH interacts with the neural circuitry underlying inhibitory processing. Herein, using a cross-sectional study design, we...
Brain Communications 2024 Jakub Vohryzek, Joana Cabral, Louis-David Lord et al. 33 citations
Psilocybin therapy for depression has started to show promise, yet the underlying causal mechanisms are not currently known. Here, we leveraged the differential outcome in responders and non-responders to psilocybin (10 and 25 mg, 7 days apart) therapy for depression-to gain new insights into regions and networks implicated in the restoration of healthy brain dynamics. We used large-scale brain...
Brain Communications 2024 Ashley Ghaw, Alisha Chunduri, Arnold Chang et al. 13 citations
Lysergic acid diethylamide is a hallucinogen with complex neurobiological and behavioural effects. This is the first study to use MRI to follow functional changes in brain activity in response to different doses of lysergic acid diethylamide in fully awake, drug-naive rats. We hypothesized that lysergic acid diethylamide would show a dose-dependent increase in activity in the prefrontal cortex...
Brain Communications 2024 Miriam Vignando, Dominic H Ffytche, Ndaba Mazibuko et al. 7 citations
Abstract Psychosis and visual hallucinations are a prevalent non-motor symptom of Parkinson's disease, negatively affecting patients’ quality of life and constituting a greater risk for dementia. Understanding neural mechanisms associated to these symptoms is instrumental for treatment development. The mismatch negativity is an event-related potential evoked by a violation in a sequence of...
Brain Communications 2024 Yasir Çatal, Georg Northoff 3 citations
This scientific commentary refers to ‘Brain dynamics predictive of response to psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression’, by Vohryzek et al. (https://doi.org/10.1093/braincomms/fcae049)
Brain Communications 2024
Abstract The functional connectivity of the default mode network is important in understanding the neuro-pathophysiological abnormalities in patients with non-arteritic anterior ischaemic optic neuropathy. Independent component analysis can effectively determine within and between network connectivity of different brain components. Therefore, in order to explore the association between the...
Brain Communications January 4, 2022 Daniel Kondziella, Charlotte Martial 1 citation
peer reviewed
Brain Communications 2022 Huiqing Hu, Rhodri Cusack, Lorina Naci
One of the great frontiers of consciousness science is understanding how early consciousness arises in the development of the human infant. The reciprocal relationship between the default mode network and fronto-parietal networks-the dorsal attention and executive control network-is thought to facilitate integration of information across the brain and its availability for a wide set of...
Brain Communications December 28, 2021 T. K. Stripp
I read with great interest and diligence the paper from Peinkhofer et al. regarding how near-death experiences (NDEs) could be understood as the evolutionary product of death feigning (thanatosis). The authors provided this rather novel and interesting hypothesis regarding the evolutionary origin of NDEs, a topic that has most definitely received little attention in research.Could there be...
Brain Communications June 22, 2021 Costanza Peinkhofer, Charlotte Martial, Héléna Cassol et al. 49 citations
Abstract Near-death experiences are known from all parts of the world, various times and numerous cultural backgrounds. This universality suggests that near-death experiences may have a biological origin and purpose. Adhering to a preregistered protocol, we investigate the hypothesis that thanatosis, aka death-feigning, a last-resort defense mechanism in animals, is the evolutionary origin of...
Brain Communications June 22, 2021 Kevin R. Nelson 3 citations
This scientific commentary refers to ‘The evolutionary origin of near-death experiences: a systematic investigation’, by Peinkhofer et al. (https://doi. org/10. 1093/braincomms/fcab132). In the Gifford Lectures of 1901–02 at the University of Edinburgh, William James a physician, psychologist and philosopher categorized spiritual experiences thereby establishing the origins of their scientific...
Brain Communications 2021
AbstractCortical accumulation of amyloid beta is one of the first events of Alzheimer’s disease pathophysiology, and has been suggested to follow a consistent spatiotemporal ordering, starting in the posterior cingulate cortex, precuneus and medio-orbitofrontal cortex. These regions overlap with those of the default mode network, a brain network also involved in memory functions. Aberrant...