Wakefulness can be distinguished from general anesthesia and sleep in flies using a massive library of univariate time series analyses.
PLoS biology July 1, 2025 Angus Leung, Ahmed Mahmoud, Travis Jeans et al. 3 citations
Only 47 out of over 7,700 time-series features reliably distinguished wakefulness from anesthesia or sleep across all evaluation groups of flies. Most of these features were related to autocorrelation, indicating that signals during wakefulness remained correlated to their past for longer than during anesthesia or sleep. Features related to complexity or spectral power, often proposed as consciousness markers, failed to generalize across all datasets, though many showed consistent direction of effect. These results caution that many newly discovered potential consciousness markers may not generalize across datasets, and point to autocorrelation as a class of dynamical properties that does.