Consciousness and cerebral baseline activity fluctuations
Human Brain Mapping May 8, 2008 Melanie Boly, Christophe Phillips, Evelyne Balteau et al. 73 citations
Variability in how people perceive the same sensory stimulus from one moment to the next may stem from ongoing fluctuations in baseline brain activity. This review examines evidence that activity levels in sensory brain areas before a stimulus predict whether that stimulus will be consciously perceived. The findings are discussed in the context of recent discoveries about the structure of spontaneous BOLD signal fluctuations in the awake human brain, and possible sources of these baseline fluctuations are considered.