Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews
September 1, 2017
Georg Northoff, Zirui Huang
235 citations
The brain's intrinsic time and space are fundamental for consciousness. The Temporo-spatial Theory of Consciousness (TTC) proposes four distinct neuronal mechanisms that correspond to different dimensions of consciousness: (1) temporo-spatial nestedness of spontaneous activity accounts for the level or state of consciousness, serving as a neural predisposition; (2) temporo-spatial alignment of pre-stimulus activity accounts for the content or form of consciousness, acting as a neural prerequisite; (3) temporo-spatial expansion of early stimulus-induced activity accounts for phenomenal consciousness, as neural correlates; and (4) temporo-spatial globalization of late stimulus-induced activity accounts for cognitive features, as neural consequences.
Cognitive neuroscience
January 1, 2016
Georg Northoff
213 citations
The self is often thought of as a high-level cognitive function, but this paper argues that self-specificity is a fundamental feature of the brain's spontaneous activity, particularly in cortical midline structures. Evidence shows overlap between resting-state activity and self-related processing in these regions, and resting-state patterns can predict later degrees of self-specificity. The author proposes the basis model, which conceives self-specificity as basic rather than higher-order, linking it to emotions, reward, and perception. This spontaneous self-specificity may provide a foundation for coding the self as subject in relation to internal or external mental events, connecting self-consciousness and phenomenal consciousness.
Clinical Psychopharmacology and Neuroscience
December 26, 2014
Georg Northoff
65 citations
Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) may arise from abnormally elevated resting state activity in the auditory cortex, abnormal modulation of the auditory cortex by anterior cortical midline regions of the default-mode network, and neural confusion between resting state changes and stimulus-induced activity. This 'resting state hypothesis' integrates recent findings on intrinsic brain activity and corresponds with subjective-experiential features from phenomenological accounts, leading to a 'neurophenomenal resting state hypothesis' of AVH in schizophrenia.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
October 4, 2018
Andrea Scalabrini, Clara Mucci, Georg Northoff
58 citations
A multilayered model of the self links four layers—relational alignment, self-constitution, self-manifestation, and self-expansion—to distinct neural correlates and levels of personality organization. The model proposes that psychotic, borderline, and neurotic personality organizations correspond respectively to disruptions in self-constitution, self-manifestation, and self-expansion. Grounded in empirical data on neural correlates of the self, early attachment experiences, and resting-state brain activity (rest-self overlap/containment), the model integrates psychodynamic and neuroscientific perspectives. The spontaneous activity of the brain, intrinsically related to the self, may be key to understanding how the default state navigates internal and external reality.
Neuroscience of Consciousness
January 1, 2022
Austin Clinton Cooper, Bianca Ventura, Georg Northoff
54 citations
Advanced meditators often report experiences of nondual awareness—a state without boundaries between self and environment. This review of functional magnetic resonance imaging studies across meditation types and experience levels finds that meditation reorganizes the brain's spatial topography. Key neural changes include decreased activity in the posterior default mode network (DMN), increased activity in the central executive network (CEN), reduced connectivity within the posterior DMN and between posterior and anterior DMN, increased connectivity within the anterior DMN and CEN, and significantly altered connectivity between DMN and CEN, likely nonlinear. These changes suggest a shift from mental-self-processing toward interoceptive and exteroceptive self-processing, enabling explicit nondual awareness. The authors propose a topographic reorganization model of meditation (TRoM) linking neural and experiential effects.
NeuroImage
May 1, 2021
Pengmin Qin, Xuehai Wu, Changwei Wu et al.
51 citations
Consciousness depends on a network of brain regions that integrate sensory and motor information. Analyzing fMRI data from people in preserved (awake, fully conscious brain-injury survivors), reduced (N1-sleep, minimally conscious), and lost (N3-sleep, anesthesia, unresponsive wakefulness) states, plus a unique rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep group, researchers identified key hubs whose degree centrality—a measure of network importance—dropped significantly when consciousness was reduced or absent. These hubs included the supplementary motor area, bilateral supramarginal gyrus, supragenual/dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and left middle temporal gyrus. A higher-order sensorimotor circuit connecting these regions showed functional connectivity that correlated with consciousness levels across groups and remained active in REM sleep, suggesting this circuit supports consciousness and offers new targets for treating disorders of consciousness.
Schizophrenia Bulletin
July 28, 2015
Jeffrey D. Robinson, Nils-Frederic Wagner, Georg Northoff
47 citations
Schizophrenia involves a disturbance of the self, particularly the sense of agency—the feeling of controlling one's own actions and thoughts. Current models of agency involve both bottom-up sensory processes and top-down cognitive influences. This review proposes that ongoing brain activity in self-referential regions, especially the default mode network, adds a deeper layer of influence. Neuroimaging studies show that aberrant activity in these regions in schizophrenia can lead to misattributing internally generated stimuli as external, producing symptoms like thought insertion and delusions of control. This framework suggests neuroimaging can improve conceptualization, measurement, and treatment of agency disturbances.
Early intervention in psychiatry
March 1, 2023
Lachlan Kent, Barnaby Nelson, Georg Northoff
35 citations
Distortions in how time is experienced, perceived, and processed appear across many psychiatric disorders, including depression, mania, anxiety, autism, impulse-control, dissociative, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders. A proposed Transdiagnostic Taxonomy of (disordered) Time (TTT) maps these temporal disturbances onto a 2 × 2 × 2 state space that combines psychological models of temporal processing with phenomenological models of subjective time experience. The taxonomy differentiates diagnoses primarily involving distorted macro-level phenomenal temporal experiences (anxiety, dissociation/PTSD, depression, mania) from those involving distorted micro-level temporal processing (psychotic, impulse-control, autistic, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders). Temporal distortions may precede functional decline, suggesting potential for early detection and intervention in at-risk groups.
Physics of life reviews
March 1, 2025
Georg Northoff, Andrea Buccellato, Federico Zilio
31 citations
The connection between brain activity and mental experience remains poorly understood. The authors extend their earlier hypothesis that shared temporal and spatial dynamics provide a 'common currency' linking neural and mental features. They present additional evidence from thoughts, meditation, depression, and attention showing that temporal characteristics are shared by both brain and mind. New empirical examples demonstrate that spatial characteristics, such as topographic reorganization, are also shared in depression and meditation. The authors specify distinct forms of temporospatial correspondences along a continuum from simple to complex. They propose an integrated mind-brain theory called the Common currency theory (CCT) as a framework for understanding the neuro-mental relationship.
NeuroImage
August 15, 2024
Bianca Ventura, Yasir Çatal, Angelika Wolman et al.
22 citations
Meditation practices with a wider attentional focus, such as Shoonya meditation, are associated with longer intrinsic neural timescales (INTs) in the brain, measured as the autocorrelation window (ACW) of EEG signals, compared to practices with a narrower focus like Mantra or Vipassana meditation. The study compared three groups of highly proficient practitioners from different traditions and a meditation-naïve control group. The results indicate a correspondence between the width of attentional scope and the duration of neural temporal windows, suggesting that subjective attentional width relates to objective neural activity patterns.
Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews
June 1, 2025
Georg Northoff, Bianca Ventura
21 citations
The brain-mind connection remains a central challenge because subjective experience is first-person while neural activity is observed from a third-person perspective. Neurophenomenology offers a systematic method to link these domains, but does not explain how they relate independently of methodology. Spatiotemporal Neuroscience proposes that neural activity and subjective experience share analogous spatiotemporal dynamics as a common feature. This paper shows how the two frameworks can be integrated on theoretical grounds, illustrated by examples of self, meditation, and depression. The integration provides complementary insights, deepens understanding of the brain-mind connection, and suggests new methodological approaches for empirical investigation.
Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews
May 1, 2023
Georg Northoff, Andrea Scalabrini, Stuart Fogel
13 citations
Dreams occupy a bizarre and poorly understood state of consciousness. The Topographic-dynamic Re-organization model (TRoD) proposes that dreaming involves a shift toward increased activity and connectivity in the default-mode network (DMN) alongside reduced activity in the central executive network, except during lucid dreaming. Dynamically, dreams shift toward slower brain frequencies and longer timescales, placing them between wakefulness and NREM stage 2 or slow-wave sleep. This re-organization produces abnormal spatiotemporal processing of internal and external inputs, moving from temporal segregation to integration. The resulting integration yields bizarre, self-centric mental content and hallucinatory-like states, suggesting that topography and temporal dynamics may serve as a common currency linking brain activity to dream experience.
Psychopathology
June 30, 2025
Stephan Lechner, Karl Erik Sandsten, Dusan Hirjak et al.
7 citations
Altered experiences of time and space are linked to general symptoms and basic self-disorders in people with schizophrenia spectrum disorder. Self-disturbance acts as a key mediator through which fundamental time-space disruptions influence perceptual changes as well as negative, positive, and general symptoms. Data were collected at three medical expert centers using semi-structured phenomenological interviews and analyzed with network and mediation methods.
Der Nervenarzt
September 1, 2023
Dusan Hirjak, Jonas Daub, Geva A Brandt et al.
6 citations
Patients with schizophrenia often experience fragmented time and distorted spatial perception, such as abnormal interpersonal distance and orientation, which can detach them from reality and complicate therapy. Despite this, these experiences remain understudied due to a lack of standardized measurement tools. Based on spatiotemporal psychopathology (STPP), a clinical rating scale called the Scale for Space and Time Experience in Psychosis (STEP) was developed. The German version of STEP assesses 14 spatial and 11 temporal phenomena across 25 items. It demonstrates high internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.94) and significant correlation with the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS; p < 0.001), offering a valuable instrument for German-speaking countries.
bioRxiv Preprint Server
August 29, 2024
Saketh Malipeddi, Arun Sasidharan, Rahul Venugopal et al.
4 citations
preprint
Advanced meditators from the Isha Yoga tradition show shorter intrinsic neural timescales (INTs) during breath-watching, indicating deidentification with mental contents, and no significant differences in INTs between tasks, indicating non-dual awareness. Shorter INTs correlate with self-reported equanimity. The brain's intrinsic neural timescales may serve as a neural marker of equanimity.
Brain Communications
January 1, 2024
Yasir Çatal, Georg Northoff
3 citations
A commentary on a study about brain dynamics that predict response to psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression. The original study by Vohryzek and colleagues investigated how brain activity patterns before and during psilocybin treatment might identify which patients with treatment-resistant depression are likely to benefit. The commentary discusses the implications of these findings for understanding how psychedelics work in the brain and for developing personalized treatment approaches.
bioRxiv Preprint Server
February 11, 2025
Saketh Malipeddi, Arun Sasidharan, Rahul Venugopal et al.
2 citations
preprint
Meditation alters brain activity, particularly in alpha and theta frequency bands, but most research has focused on average power changes from rest to meditation rather than how quickly these changes emerge. This gap means little is known about the time-to-onset and temporal dynamics of neural shifts during meditation practice.
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
June 26, 2025
Prakash Shrimali, Arun Sasidharan, Saketh Malipeddi et al.
1 citation
preprint
Meditation involves training attention inward, but the brain activity that distinguishes meditative from non-meditative states across different traditions is not well understood. Analyzing high-density EEG data from 170 participants—121 advanced meditators and 49 controls—across Vipassana, Brahma Kumaris Raja Yoga, Heartfulness, and Isha Yoga traditions, researchers used random forest classifiers to distinguish meditative from non-meditative states with 91% accuracy. Nonlinear features contributed most, indicating a core neurodynamic profile. Classification was higher in advanced meditators (92%) than controls (85%), with different feature importance: nonlinear and aperiodic features dominated in meditators, while oscillatory and timescale features dominated in controls. Each tradition showed distinct neurodynamic profiles, suggesting multiple pathways lead to meditative states.
Communications Biology
June 12, 2026
Saketh Malipeddi, Arun Sasidharan, Bianca Ventura et al.
Advanced meditators from the Isha Yoga tradition report stronger non-dual experiences—where the boundary between self and environment dissolves—during breath-watching meditation compared to novices and meditation-naïve controls. Using EEG-based intrinsic neural timescales (INT), researchers found that across all participants, INTs are longer during internal attention (breath-watching) than during an external cognitive task. However, advanced meditators show similar INT durations between internal and external attention, and this reduced difference correlates with stronger reported non-dual experiences. The findings suggest that similar intrinsic neural timescale durations across internal and external attention may be a neural signature of non-duality.
bioRxiv Preprint Server
May 27, 2026
Praerna Chowdhury, Ramajayam Govindaraj, Arun Sasidharan et al.
preprint
Meditation-related EEG patterns are often studied by comparing meditators to passive rest or by experience level, but such designs rarely test reliability or include active controls. This study used a multi-session within-subject design with experienced Brahmakumaris Rajayoga meditators to identify reliable, state-dependent EEG dynamics. The approach addressed prior limitations, providing more valid neurophysiological markers of meditative state.
Translational psychiatry
November 21, 2025
Andrea Francesco Carluccio, Georg Northoff
Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) in psychosis and schizophrenia involve changes in brain connectivity and organization, but how these relate to the structure of subjective experience is unclear. This review proposes two neurophenomenological hypotheses. First, disruptions in connections between sensory, bodily, and language brain regions may cause temporal fragmentation in perception and thought, leading to hyperreflexivity—abnormal attention to isolated objects. Second, a reduced distinction between unimodal and transmodal brain regions may blur the boundary between outer social and inner mental spaces, causing confusion between interpersonal and intrapersonal experience. These hypotheses link brain changes directly to the structure of experience in AVH.