Scientific Reports
March 13, 2019
Emily Ridge, Sudhan Pachhain, S. Choudhury et al.
25 citations
Hyperthermia induced by 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) can be life-threatening. Here, we investigate the role of the gut microbiome and TGR5 bile acid receptors in MDMA-mediated hyperthermia. Fourteen days prior to treatment with MDMA, male Sprague-Dawley rats were provided water or water treated with antibiotics. Animals that had received antibiotics displayed a reduction in gut...
Scientific Reports
March 12, 2019
Junling Gao, Hang Kin Leung, Bonnie Wai Yan Wu et al.
Despite extensive research on various types of meditation, research on the neural correlates of religious chanting is in a nascent stage. Using multi-modal electrophysiological and neuroimaging methods, we illustrate that during religious chanting, the posterior cingulate cortex shows the largest decrease in eigenvector centrality, potentially due to regional endogenous generation of delta...
Scientific Reports
February 4, 2019
Timmy Strauss, Robin Kämpe, J. Paul Hamilton et al.
Abstract: Interpersonal touch possesses a strong affective component, which immediately evokes attention. The neural processing of such touch is moderated by specialized C-tactile nerve fibers in the periphery and results in central activation of somatosensory areas as well as regions involved in social processing, such as the superior temporal gyrus (STG). In the present functional...
Scientific Reports
December 21, 2018
Ethan M. McCormick, Eva H. Telzer
Out of the several intrinsic brain networks discovered through resting-state functional analyses in the past decade, the default mode network (DMN) has been the subject of intense interest and study. In particular, the DMN shows marked suppression during task engagement, and has led to hypothesized roles in internally-directed cognition that need to be down-regulated in order to perform...
Scientific Reports
December 6, 2018
Benjamin Baird, Anna Castelnovo, Olivia Gosseries et al.
74 citations
Humans typically lack awareness that they are dreaming while dreaming. However, at times a remarkable exception occurs and reflective consciousness can be regained while dreaming, referred to as lucid dreaming. While most individuals experience lucid dreams rarely there is substantial variance in lucid dream frequency. The neurobiological basis of lucid dreaming is unknown, but evidence points...
Scientific Reports
November 16, 2018
Dasom Lee, Do‐hyung Kang, Na-Hyun Ha et al.
Online mind-body training (MBT) programs can improve the psychological capabilities of practitioners. Although there has been a lot of effort to understand the neural mechanisms underlying the therapeutic effects of meditation, little is known about changes in electroencephalographic (EEG) functional connectivity that accompany mind-body training. The present study aimed to investigate how an...
Scientific Reports
November 5, 2018
Matthieu Darracq, Chadd M. Funk, Daniel Polyakov et al.
49 citations
Sleep and anesthesia entail alterations in conscious experience. Conscious experience may be absent (unconsciousness) or take the form of dreaming, a state in which sensory stimuli are not incorporated into conscious experience (disconnected consciousness). Recent work has identified features of cortical activity that distinguish conscious from unconscious states; however, less is known about...
Scientific Reports
October 4, 2018
Marion Quirins, Clémence Marois, Melanie Valente et al.
Pupil dilation has been reliably identified as a physiological marker of consciously reportable mental effort. This classical finding raises the question of whether or not pupil dilation could be a specific somatic signature of conscious processing. In order to explore this possibility, we engaged healthy volunteers in the 'local global' auditory paradigm we previously designed to disentangle...
Scientific Reports
September 27, 2018
Ana P. Pinheiro, Michael Schwartze, Sonja A. Kotz
44 citations
Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) are a cardinal symptom of psychosis but also occur in 6-13% of the general population. Voice perception is thought to engage an internal forward model that generates predictions, preparing the auditory cortex for upcoming sensory feedback. Impaired processing of sensory feedback in vocalization seems to underlie the experience of AVH in psychosis, but...
Scientific Reports
September 12, 2018
Benjamin Schöne, T. Gruber, Sebastian Graetz et al.
The beneficial effects of mindfulness-based therapeutic interventions have stimulated a rapidly growing body of scientific research into underlying psychological processes. Resulting evidence indicates that engaging with mindfulness meditation is associated with increased performance on a range of cognitive tasks. However, the mechanisms promoting these improvements require further...
Scientific Reports
September 11, 2018
Jenni Kononoff, Philippe A. Melas, Marsida Kallupi et al.
32 citations
Cannabis use is typically initiated during adolescence and is a significant risk factor for the development of cocaine use in adulthood. However, no preclinical studies have examined the effects of adolescent cannabinoid exposure on cocaine dependence in adulthood using the escalation model of cocaine self-administration and the assessment of negative emotional states. In the present study, we...
Scientific Reports
September 4, 2018
Zirui Huang, Phillip E. Vlisides, Vijaykumar C Tarnal et al.
Detecting covert consciousness in behaviorally unresponsive patients by brain imaging is of great interest, but a reproducible model and evidence from independent sources is still lacking. Here we demonstrate the possibility of using general anesthetics in a within-subjects study design to test methods or statistical paradigms of assessing covert consciousness. Using noninvasive neuroimaging in...
Scientific Reports
August 30, 2018
Lorina Naci, Amelie Haugg, Alex A. MacDonald et al.
69 citations
How are the myriad stimuli arriving at our senses transformed into conscious thought? To address this question, in a series of studies, we asked whether a common mechanism underlies loss of information processing in unconscious states across different conditions, which could shed light on the brain mechanisms of conscious cognition. With a novel approach, we brought together for the first time,...
Scientific Reports
August 21, 2018
Marisa Möller, Jaco Fourie, Brian Herbert Harvey
16 citations
Abstract Efavirenz is abused in a cannabis-containing mixture known as Nyaope. The addictive-like effects of efavirenz (5, 10 and 20 mg/kg) was explored using conditioned place preference (CPP) in rats following sub-acute exposure vs. methamphetamine (MA; 1 mg/kg) and Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC; 0.75 mg/kg). The most addictive dose of efavirenz was then compared to THC alone and THC plus...
Scientific Reports
August 20, 2018
Pilleriin Sikka, Henri Pesonen, Antti Revonsuo
56 citations
Waking mental well-being is assumed to be tightly linked to sleep and the affective content of dreams. However, empirical research is scant and has mostly focused on ill-being by studying the dreams of people with psychopathology. We explored the relationship between waking well-being and dream affect by measuring not only symptoms of ill-being but also different types and components of...
Scientific Reports
July 2, 2018
Masahiro Fujino, Yoshiyuki Ueda, H. Mizuhara et al.
Mindfulness meditation consists of focused attention meditation (FAM) and open monitoring meditation (OMM), both of which reduce activation of the default mode network (DMN) and mind-wandering. Although it is known that FAM requires intentional focused attention, the mechanisms of OMM remain largely unknown. To investigate this, we examined striatal functional connectivity in 17 experienced...
Scientific Reports
June 18, 2018
Lukas Heydrich, Jane Elizabeth Aspell, Guillaume Marillier et al.
Prominent theories highlight the importance of bodily perception for self-consciousness, but it is currently not known whether this is based on interoceptive or exteroceptive signals or on integrated signals from these anatomically distinct systems, nor where in the brain such integration might occur. To investigate this, we measured brain activity during the recently described 'cardio-visual...
Scientific Reports
May 21, 2018
Paul B Sharp, Bradley P Sutton, Erick J Paul et al.
Although mindfulness meditation is known to provide a wealth of psychological benefits, the neural mechanisms involved in these effects remain to be well characterized. A central question is whether the observed benefits of mindfulness training derive from specific changes in the structural brain connectome that do not result from alternative forms of experimental intervention. Measures of...
Scientific Reports
May 17, 2018
Keita Yokokawa, Takehito Ito, Keisuke Takahata et al.
5 citations
Abstract Perceptual changes in shape, size, or color are observed in patients with derealization symptoms; however, the underlying neural and molecular mechanisms are not well understood. The current study explored the relationship between neural activity associated with altered colorfulness perception assessed by fMRI and striatal dopamine D2receptor availability measured by [11C]raclopride...
Scientific Reports
April 26, 2018
C. Wong, B. Yip, T. Gao et al.
Psychological and behavioural interventions may be effective in reducing menopause-related symptoms. This randomized controlled trial aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in reducing menopause-related symptoms by comparing with an active control group, the menopause education control (MEC). Symptomatic peri-menopausal and post-menopausal women with...
Scientific Reports
April 26, 2018
Andrea Piarulli, Andrea Zaccaro, Marco Laurino et al.
The coupling between respiration and neural activity within olfactory areas and hippocampus has recently been unambiguously demonstrated, its neurophysiological basis sustained by the well-assessed mechanical sensitivity of the olfactory epithelium. We herein hypothesize that this coupling reverberates to the whole brain, possibly modulating the subject's behavior and state of consciousness....
Scientific Reports
April 12, 2018
Delphine Oudiette, Pauline Dodet, Nahema Ledard et al.
A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has been fixed in the paper.
Scientific Reports
April 11, 2018
Salah Boussen, Andreas Spiegler, Christian Bénar et al.
4 citations
General anesthesia (GA) is a reversible manipulation of consciousness whose mechanism is mysterious at the level of neural networks leaving space for several competing hypotheses. We recorded electrocorticography (ECoG) signals in patients who underwent intracranial monitoring during awake surgery for the treatment of cerebral tumors in functional areas of the brain. Therefore, we recorded the...
Scientific Reports
April 3, 2018
Lieneke Katharina Janssen, Iris Duif, Ilke van Loon et al.
10 citations
Abstract Mindfulness-based interventions are thought to reduce compulsive behavior such as overeating by promoting behavioral flexibility. Here the main aim was to provide support for mindfulness-mediated improvements in reversal learning, a direct measure of behavioral flexibility. We investigated whether an 8-week mindful eating intervention improved outcome-based reversal learning relative...
Scientific Reports
March 5, 2018
Kai Zhang, Yuko Fujita, Kenji Hashimoto
Since the metabolism of (R,S)-ketamine to (2R,6R)-hydroxynorketamine (HNK) is reported to be essential for ketamine's antidepressant effects, there is an increasing debate about antidepressant effects of (2R,6R)-HNK. Using pharmacokinetic and behavioral techniques, we investigated whether intracerebroventricular (i.c.v.) infusion of (R)-ketamine or (2R,6R)-HNK show antidepressant effects in a...