Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
August 21, 2026
Mohamed Khaled Younes Raslan
Consciousness remains incompletely explained at the anatomical, biophysical, and functional levels. Although existing theories characterize key functional correlates of conscious experience—including global broadcasting, information integration, attentional selection, working-memory-based awareness, and electromagnetic field dynamics—none has yet identified a specific cellular mechanism...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
July 1, 2026
Kei Torii, Maho Jinno
Ketamine responses vary across patients and sessions, suggesting that dose alone is an incomplete organizing principle. We propose a state-first Gate-Amplifier-Reintegration framework in which awake low-dose ketamine acts primarily as an Amplifier of transient network flexibility, whereas autonomic-salience stability is treated as a candidate Gate that may shape whether this flexibility remains...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
June 4, 2026
Elena Bondi, Flavia Carbone, Giandomenico Schiena et al.
Introduction: Affective disorders (ADs) are characterized by profound emotional processing deficits involving disrupted neural network activity and connectivity, particularly within the default mode network and fronto-temporal circuits, with abnormalities in theta and alpha oscillatory patterns. While current treatments primarily target mood symptoms, emotional processing impairments often...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
January 22, 2026
Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic
1 citation
Cognition, sentience, intelligence, awareness, and mind are often treated as distinct phenomena that emerge only at higher levels of biological organization, typically associated with nervous systems or human cognition. However, empirical research increasingly demonstrates learning, memory, adaptive behavior, and goal-directed regulation across a wide range of living systems, including single...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2026
Malcolm Wright, Olivia Petit, Alexander Schnack
This article provides a novel functionalist account of embodiment in immersive virtual environments, grounded in a formal model of cognition, supported by past empirical evidence, and offering a testable framework for predicting when virtual experiences will produce cognitive and emotional effects. Our approach complements existing work on telepresence and subjective experience by applying the...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
August 5, 2025
Dotun Adeleye Adeyinka, Donelson R. Forsyth, Suzanne Currie et al.
7 citations
Psilocybin, a compound found in Psilocybe mushrooms, is emerging as a promising treatment for neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders, including major depressive disorder. Its potential therapeutic effects stem from promoting neuroprotection, neurogenesis, and neuroplasticity, key factors in brain health. Psilocybin could help combat mild neurodegeneration by increasing synaptic density and...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2025
Stephen Grossberg
This article describes a biological neural network model that explains how humans learn to understand large language models and their meanings. This kind of learning typically occurs when a student learns from a teacher about events that they experience together. Multiple types of self-organizing brain processes are involved, including content-addressable memory; conscious visual perception;...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2025
Johnjoe Mcfadden
McFadden's conscious electromagnetic information (CEMI) field theory proposes that the human brain functions as a hybrid digital-EM field computer. The digital computations are implemented by the matter-based neuronal-synaptic network analogous to conventional digital computers operating Boolean-like logic gates nonconsciously and in parallel. Yet neuronal electrical firing and synaptic...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2025
J J Joshua Davis, Florian Schübeler, Ian J. Kirk et al.
This study explores the layered coherence within human cognition as measured through EEG. Signals were collected from two groups (meditators vs. non-meditators) across six conditions: Meditation, Scrambled Words, Ambiguous Images, Math Mind, Sentences, and Video Watching. We analyzed the EEG data using Shannon Entropy, Pearson's Skewness, Total Power, and Dominant Frequency indices, now taken...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
May 25, 2023
Charles Gervais, Louis-Philippe Boucher, Guillermo Martinez Villar et al.
25 citations
The healthy conscious brain is thought to operate near a critical state, reflecting optimal information processing and high susceptibility to external stimuli. Conversely, deviations from the critical state are hypothesized to give rise to altered states of consciousness (ASC). Measures of criticality could therefore be an effective way of establishing the conscious state of an individual....
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
May 18, 2022
R. Pepperell
This article addresses the question of whether machine understanding requires consciousness. Some researchers in the field of machine understanding have argued that it is not necessary for computers to be conscious as long as they can match or exceed human performance in certain tasks. But despite the remarkable recent success of machine learning systems in areas such as natural language...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
March 21, 2022
Andrea Zaccaro, Andrea Piarulli, Lorenza Melosini et al.
32 citations
The modulatory effect of nasal respiration on integrative brain functions and hence consciousness has recently been unambiguously demonstrated. This effect is sustained by the olfactory epithelium mechanical sensitivity complemented by the existence of massive projections between the olfactory bulb and the prefrontal cortex. However, studies on slow nasal breathing (SNB) in the context of...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2022
Sidney Carls-Diamante
28 citations
The cognitive capacities and behavioural repertoire of octopuses have led to speculation that these animals may possess consciousness. However, the nervous system of octopuses is radically different from those typically associated with conscious experience: rather than being centralised and profoundly integrated, the octopus nervous system is distributed into components with considerable...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2022
Thurston Lacalli
9 citations
This paper elaborates on a proposal for mapping a configuration space for selector circuits (SCs), defined as the subset of neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) responsible for evoking particular qualia, to its experiential counterpart, experience-space (E-space), as part of an investigation into the nature of conscious experience as it first emerged in evolution. The dimensionality of...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2022
Brian Key, Oressia Zalucki, Deborah J Brown
9 citations
Understanding the neural bases of subjective experience remains one of the great challenges of the natural sciences. Higher-order theories of consciousness are typically defended by assessments of neural activity in higher cortical regions during perception, often with disregard to the nature of the neural computations that these regions execute. We have sought to refocus the problem toward...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2022
Paul Skokowski
9 citations
Accounting for qualia in the natural world is a difficult business, and it is worth understanding why. A close examination of several theories of mind-Behaviorism, Identity Theory, Functionalism, and Integrated Information Theory-will be discussed, revealing shortcomings for these theories in explaining the contents of conscious experience: qualia. It will be argued that in order to overcome...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2022
Uziel Awret
This paper introduces a novel dual-aspect theory of consciousness that is based on the principle of holographic-duality in modern physics and explores the prospects of making philosophically significant empirical discoveries about the physical correlates of consciousness. The theory is motivated by an approach that identifies certain anti-physicalist problem intuitions associated with...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2022
Michael Levin
Synthetic biology and bioengineering provide the opportunity to create novel embodied cognitive systems (otherwise known as minds) in a very wide variety of chimeric architectures combining evolved and designed material and software. These advances are disrupting familiar concepts in the philosophy of mind, and require new ways of thinking about and comparing truly diverse intelligences, whose...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2022
Daniel Revach, Moti Salti
Our ability to understand the mind and its relation to the body is highly dependent on the way we define consciousness and the lens through which we study it. We argue that looking at conscious experience from an information-theory perspective can help obtain a unified and parsimonious account of the mind. Today's dominant models consider consciousness to be a specialized function of the brain...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2022
Günter Ehret, Raymond Romand
Awareness or consciousness in the context of stimulus perception can directly be assessed in well controlled test situations with humans via the persons' reports about their subjective experiences with the stimuli. Since we have no direct access to subjective experiences in animals, their possible awareness or consciousness in stimulus perception tasks has often been inferred from behavior and...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
December 1, 2021
Minkyung Kim, Hyoungkyu Kim, Zirui Huang et al.
Continuous switching between internal and external modes in the brain appears important for generating models of the self and the world. However, how the brain transitions between these two modes remains unknown. We propose that a large synchronization fluctuation of brain networks, emerging only near criticality (i.e., a balanced state between order and disorder), spontaneously creates...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2021
Giorgio Vallortigara
34 citations
Animals need to distinguish sensory input caused by their own movement from sensory input which is due to stimuli in the outside world. This can be done by an efference copy mechanism, a carbon copy of the movement-command that is routed to sensory structures. Here I tried to link the mechanism of the efference copy with the idea of the philosopher Thomas Reid that the senses would have a...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2021
Matthew N Van de Poll, Bruno van Swinderen
23 citations
The brain is a prediction machine. Yet the world is never entirely predictable, for any animal. Unexpected events are surprising, and this typically evokes prediction error signatures in mammalian brains. In humans such mismatched expectations are often associated with an emotional response as well, and emotional dysregulation can lead to cognitive disorders such as depression or schizophrenia....
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2021
Robert Kozma, Bernard J. Baars, Natalie Geld
Spatio-temporal brain activity monitored by EEG recordings in humans and other mammals has identified beta/gamma oscillations (20-80 Hz), which are self-organized into spatio-temporal structures recurring at theta/alpha rates (4-12 Hz). These structures have statistically significant correlations with sensory stimuli and reinforcement contingencies perceived by the subject. The repeated...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2021
Yali Chen, Jun Zhang
Consciousness is considered a result of specific neuronal processes and mechanisms in the brain. Various suggested neuronal mechanisms, including the information integration theory (IIT), global neuronal workspace theory (GNWS), and neuronal construction of time and space as in the context of the temporospatial theory of consciousness (TTC), have been laid forth. However, despite their focus on...