The temporal structure of resting-state brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex predicts self-consciousness
Neuropsychologia January 21, 2016 Zirui Huang, Natsuho Obara, Henry Davis et al. 144 citations
The temporal structure of spontaneous brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex is linked to private self-consciousness. In 47 healthy subjects, the power-law exponent—a measure of long-range temporal correlations in resting-state fMRI signals—was correlated with scores on the private self-consciousness subscale of the Revised Self-Consciousness Scale. No such correlation appeared for public or social self-consciousness, nor for other resting-state measures like functional connectivity. This is the first evidence that the scale-free dynamics of cortical midline structures specifically relate to the private dimension of self-consciousness, suggesting a neural basis for the overlap between resting-state activity and self-related processing.