Current biology : CB
August 17, 2026
Jacinthe Cataldi, Andria Pelentritou, Sophie Schwartz et al.
The brain continuously integrates information from the external environment (exteroception) and the internal bodily milieu (interoception). However, how the balance between these two processing streams shifts across vigilance states with differing levels of environmental responsiveness remains poorly understood. Here, we examined neural responses to external auditory and internal cardiac...
Current biology : CB
July 2, 2026
Youngjai Park, Younghwa Cha, Hyoungkyu Kim et al.
Information continuously flows between regions of the human brain, forming patterns that shift across states of consciousness, cognitive modes, and neuropsychiatric conditions. While functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) reveals large-scale activity changes over seconds, the electrophysiological dynamics governing sub-second reconfiguration remain poorly understood. Here, relative phase...
Current biology : CB
April 20, 2026
Nikhil Bhatla, Kathryn Cheong, Sho Takahashi et al.
The phenomenon of blindsight provides a unique opportunity to uncover brain areas important for conscious vision. Patients with blindsight lose the conscious experience of seeing while still being able to detect and locate visual stimuli. Blindsight occurs after damage to the primary visual cortex (V1). Rodents are likewise able to detect and locate visual stimuli after damage to V1, though...
Current biology : CB
January 5, 2026
Hakan Kucukdereli, Amelia M Douglass
Small amounts of stress are thought to have beneficial effects. A new study reports a mechanism by which the psychedelic drug, psilocybin, causes acute release of stress hormones, despite its known long-term anti-anxiety effects.
Current biology : CB
December 1, 2025
Torge Dellert, Henning Balster, Insa Schlossmacher et al.
In the search for neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs), prominent theories disagree about the role of sensory versus widespread fronto-parietal brain activity. Research on auditory awareness has been widely neglected, and disentangling NCCs from correlates of task-related post-perceptual processes (e.g., report) is an ongoing challenge. In the present study, we addressed these issues using...
Current biology : CB
October 20, 2025
Patrick Haggard, Matthew R Longo
Our own body is the constant accompaniment of our waking mental life, and the seat of all our sensory experience and responses. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the body is a key component in individual self-consciousness, in addition to other, psychological components such as autobiographical memory and explicit self-construal. The experiences that we have of and through our body are a good way to...
Current biology : CB
June 9, 2025
Davide Albertini, Maria Del Vecchio, Ivana Sartori et al.
9 citations
Distilling the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) in humans is challenging due to limitations in the spatiotemporal resolution of recording techniques and confounds related to pre- and post-perceptual processes. In this study, we leveraged the detailed insights provided by human intracortical recordings to elucidate how somatosensory responses to simple tactile stimuli vary across...
Current biology : CB
May 5, 2025
Pavlos I Topalidis, Gianpaolo Demarchi, Lisa Reisinger et al.
1 citation
Imagine listening to a familiar song on the radio. As the melody unfolds, you often anticipate the following note or beat before it plays. This ability reflects the brain's capacity to extract statistical regularities from sensory input and predict future sensory events. It is considered automatic, requiring little to no conscious effort or attention.1,2,3,4,5 But to what extent is this...
Current biology : CB
April 21, 2025
Jovin R Jacobs, Adam D Douglass
A hallmark of depression is a tendency to become passive when faced with overwhelming challenges. A recent study models this phenomenon in zebrafish and discovers a novel mechanism by which the antidepressant drug ketamine promotes long-term improvements in behavioral persistence.
Current biology : CB
March 24, 2025
Christopher A Del Negro
Slowly paced breathing underlies mind-body practices like yoga and meditation. Neuroscience is beginning to unravel the mechanisms underlying breathing and emotions, such as anxiety. Now a circuit from the neocortex to the primordial brainstem has been identified in mice, which modulates breathing and influences anxiety.
Current biology : CB
February 3, 2025
Shuai Chang, Xinyu Zhang, Yangjianyi Cao et al.
Activity in the early visual cortex is thought to tightly couple with conscious experience, including feedback-driven mental imagery. However, in aphantasia (a complete lack of visual imagery), the state of mental imagery, what takes its place, or how any activity relates to qualia remains unknown. This study analyzed univariate (amplitude) and multivariate (decoding)...
Current biology : CB
November 4, 2024
Giulia Cabbai, Chris Racey, Julia Simner et al.
The contemporary definition of mental imagery is characterized by two aspects: a sensory representation that resembles, but does not result from, perception, and an associated subjective experience. Neuroimaging demonstrated imagery-related sensory representations in primary visual cortex (V1) that show striking parallels to perception. However, it remains unclear whether these representations...
Current biology : CB
August 19, 2024
Vincent Courdavault, Nicolas Papon
1 citation
Our knowledge of the biosynthesis of medicinal compounds from plants remains limited. A new study has deciphered the complete metabolic pathway leading to the biosynthesis of the psychedelic mescaline in the cactus peyote, suggesting the development of biotechnological strategies for a sustainable supply of this important plant drug.
Current biology : CB
November 21, 2022
Sophie Schwartz, Alice Clerget, Lampros Perogamvros
Nightmare disorder (ND) is characterized by dreams with strong negative emotions occurring during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. ND is mainly treated by imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT), where the patients are asked to change the negative story line of their nightmare to a more positive one. We here used targeted memory reactivation (TMR) during REM sleep to strengthen IRT-related memories and...
Current biology : CB
December 20, 2021
Aurélie M Stephan, Sandro Lecci, Jacinthe Cataldi et al.
73 citations
What accounts for feeling deeply asleep? Standard sleep recordings only incompletely reflect subjective aspects of sleep and some individuals with so-called sleep misperception frequently feel awake although sleep recordings indicate clear-cut sleep. To identify the determinants of sleep perception, we performed 787 awakenings in 20 good sleepers and 10 individuals with sleep misperception and...
Current biology : CB
July 12, 2021
Veith Weilnhammer, Merve Fritsch, Meera Chikermane et al.
In the search for the neural correlates of consciousness, it has remained controversial whether prefrontal cortex determines what is consciously experienced or, alternatively, serves only complementary functions, such as introspection or action. Here, we provide converging evidence from computational modeling and two functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments that indicated a key role of...
Current biology : CB
April 12, 2021
Karen R Konkoly, Kristoffer Appel, Emma Chabani et al.
126 citations
Dreams take us to a different reality, a hallucinatory world that feels as real as any waking experience. These often-bizarre episodes are emblematic of human sleep but have yet to be adequately explained. Retrospective dream reports are subject to distortion and forgetting, presenting a fundamental challenge for neuroscientific studies of dreaming. Here we show that individuals who are asleep...
Current biology : CB
June 22, 2020
Matthieu Koroma, Célia Lacaux, Thomas Andrillon et al.
34 citations
Sleep leads to a disconnection from the external world. Even when sleepers regain consciousness during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, little, if any, external information is incorporated into dream content [1-3]. While gating mechanisms might be at play to avoid interference on dreaming activity [4], a total disconnection from an ever-changing environment may prevent the sleeper from promptly...
Current biology : CB
November 8, 2011
Martin Dresler, Stefan P. Koch, Renate Wehrle et al.
Since the discovery of the close association between rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and dreaming, much effort has been devoted to link physiological signatures of REM sleep to the contents of associated dreams [1-4]. Due to the impossibility of experimentally controlling spontaneous dream activity, however, a direct demonstration of dream contents by neuroimaging methods is lacking. By...
Current biology : CB
August 10, 2010
David Alais, John Cass, Robert P O'Shea et al.
When viewing a different stimulus with each eye, we experience the remarkable phenomenon of binocular rivalry: alternations in consciousness between the stimuli [1, 2]. According to a popular theory first proposed in 1901, neurons encoding the two stimuli engage in reciprocal inhibition [3-8] so that those processing one stimulus inhibit those processing the other, yielding consciousness of one...
Current biology : CB
December 15, 2009
Vincent Walsh
Our subjective experience of the order in which things happens feels secure to us: C follows B follows A. This impression of order is simply that, an impression. A recent study shows that our impressions can sometimes be illusory.
Current biology : CB
July 26, 2005
John-Dylan Haynes, Geraint Rees
Can the rapid stream of conscious experience be predicted from brain activity alone? Recently, spatial patterns of activity in visual cortex have been successfully used to predict feature-specific stimulus representations for both visible and invisible stimuli. However, because these studies examined only the prediction of static and unchanging perceptual states during extended periods of...