Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews
March 1, 2025
Liad Mudrik, Melanie Boly, Stanislas Dehaene et al.
68 citations
In a structured public debate at the 2022 meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, proponents of five major theories—Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, Higher-Order Theories, Integrated Information Theory, Recurrent Processing Theory, and Predictive Processing—clarified their theories' core mechanisms, foundational premises, and what each theory aims to explain. The discussion revealed more controversy than agreement, particularly on the most basic questions: what consciousness is, how to identify conscious states, and what any adequate theory must account for. Addressing these foundational disagreements is essential for advancing the field and enabling meaningful comparison of competing theories.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2021
Francesco Ellia, Jeremiah Hendren, Matteo Grasso et al.
61 citations
Subjective experience can be objectively explained in physical terms by moving beyond cognitive functions and understanding how experience is structured. Integrated information theory provides a framework to account for both the essential properties of every experience and the specific properties that make particular experiences feel the way they do, avoiding the fallacy that only objective properties should be explained by science.
bioRxiv Preprint Server
March 19, 2017
Melanie Boly, Marcello Massimini, Naotsugu Tsychiya et al.
56 citations
preprint
The role of the frontal cortex in consciousness is debated. This perspective critically reviews clinical and neuroimaging evidence on whether the front or back of the cortex specifies conscious contents, and discusses promising research avenues. The authors argue that current evidence does not clearly support a primary role for the frontal cortex in generating conscious experience, pointing instead to posterior regions as more directly involved. They suggest that future research should focus on distinguishing neural correlates of consciousness from prerequisites and consequences.
Communications biology
August 5, 2024
Charlotte Maschke, Jordan O'Byrne, Michele Angelo Colombo et al.
50 citations
Consciousness may depend on brain activity poised at criticality—a state with complex patterns and high sensitivity to disruption. Analyzing resting-state EEG from healthy volunteers under propofol, xenon, or ketamine anesthesia, the study found that unconsciousness (from propofol or xenon) shifted brain dynamics away from avalanche criticality and the edge of chaos. Ketamine anesthesia preserved consciousness (vivid dreams) and criticality. Dynamical properties from resting EEG accurately predicted individual values of the perturbational complexity index (PCI), a TMS-based consciousness measure. The findings link perturbational complexity to criticality and suggest criticality is necessary for consciousness.
Psychology of consciousness (Washington, D.C.)
March 1, 2019
Benjamin Baird, Brady A Riedner, Melanie Boly et al.
41 citations
Lucid dreaming occurs more often in long-term meditators than in people who do not meditate. Among non-meditators, lucid dream frequency is linked to the ability to put experience into words, while among meditators it is linked to observing and decentering aspects of mindfulness. However, an 8-week mindfulness course did not increase lucid dream frequency. The findings suggest a continuity between awareness during waking and sleeping states and connect meditation training with meta-awareness, but the precise nature of the link remains unclear.
Consciousness and cognition
January 1, 2022
Benjamin Baird, Mariel Kalkach Aparicio, Tariq Alauddin et al.
17 citations
Spontaneous episodic thoughts about the past and future are common during waking but rarely occur during N2 or REM sleep. Analysis of thought reports from 138 participants who underwent experience-sampling while awake and serial awakenings during sleep shows that waking spontaneous thought frequently includes autobiographical planning with a strong bias toward the future. In contrast, dreaming sleep states rarely feature such mental time travel. This suggests that human consciousness differs substantially across the sleep-wake cycle in how it typically engages with episodic past and future events.
bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology
October 31, 2023
Charlotte Maschke, Jordan O'Byrne, Michele Angelo Colombo et al.
7 citations
preprint
Consciousness may depend on brain activity poised at criticality, a state with optimal computational properties. Electroencephalograms were recorded from healthy, unresponsive volunteers under propofol, xenon, or ketamine anesthesia. Ketamine spared consciousness (vivid dreams), allowing separation of unresponsiveness from unconsciousness. Unconscious states showed a departure from both the edge of activity propagation and the edge of chaos. The perturbational complexity index (PCI), a sensitive consciousness measure, was predicted from these dynamical properties with a mean absolute error below 7%. Results link PCI to criticality and support criticality's role in consciousness.
Scientific data
May 23, 2025
Alia Seedat, Alex Lepauvre, Jay Jeschke et al.
5 citations
An intracranial EEG dataset was collected from 38 epilepsy patients across three research centers as part of an adversarial collaboration testing Global Neuronal Workspace Theory and Integrated Information Theory. Participants viewed visual stimuli—faces, objects, letters, and false fonts—in three orientations and for three durations, performing a Go/No-Go target detection task. The dataset includes demographics, clinical information, electrode reconstructions, behavioral performance, and eye-tracking data, all converted to BIDS format. It is intended for reuse in consciousness science and vision neuroscience to investigate stimulus processing, target detection, and task-relevance.
bioRxiv Preprint Server
April 18, 2024
Melanie Boly, Richard Smith, Giulietta Vigueras Borrego et al.
5 citations
preprint
A state called pure presence, reported in meditative traditions as a vivid experience without thoughts, perceptions, or self, was examined in twenty-two long-term meditators using high-density EEG. During pure presence, brain activity showed widespread reductions in gamma and delta power compared to mind-wandering, watching a movie, active thinking, and dreamless sleep. The strongest gamma decreases occurred in the posteromedial cortex. These findings align with integrated information theory's prediction that vivid consciousness can arise when the brain's cortical substrate is largely quiet yet highly awake.
Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Annual International Conference
July 1, 2019
Minji Lee, Benjamin Baird, Olivia Gosseries et al.
4 citations
Cortical networks show differences in functional integration and segregation across states of consciousness, but not in overall connectivity. In the beta frequency band, functional integration during wakefulness exceeded that during NREM sleep. In the theta band, functional segregation (transitivity and clustering coefficient) was stronger in NREM sleep without conscious experience than in wakefulness or REM sleep, while the opposite pattern appeared in the beta band. No significant differences in the weighted phase lag index were found among wakefulness, REM sleep with conscious experience, NREM sleep with conscious experience, and NREM sleep without conscious experience. These findings may relate to cortical bistability and contribute to understanding neural correlates of consciousness.
Aperture Neuro
March 18, 2026
Melanie Boly
Consciousness is not an epiphenomenon but a prerequisite for most purposeful behaviors in humans. Over the past two decades, consciousness science has advanced from descriptive correlations to mechanistic predictions, with the Perturbational Complexity Index (PCI) from TMS-EEG indicating about a 95% probability of detecting consciousness in non-communicative patients when purposeful behavior is present. Recent studies in neurotypical individuals and communicative patients, using refined statistical methods and awareness scales validated by subjective reports, consistently suggest that some degree of stimulus awareness is necessary for above-chance performance. Consciousness, intelligence, and cognitive abilities can dissociate, motivating Integrated Information Theory, which generates testable predictions about conscious states independently of behavior.
bioRxiv Preprint Server
June 23, 2023
Oscar Ferrante, Urszula Gorska-Klimowska, Simon Henin et al.
preprint
An open science adversarial collaboration directly juxtaposed Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT) by investigating neural correlates of visual experience. 256 human subjects viewed suprathreshold stimuli for variable durations while neural activity was measured with fMRI, MEG, and ECoG. Information about conscious content was found in visual, ventro-temporal, and inferior frontal cortex, with sustained responses in occipital and lateral temporal cortex reflecting stimulus duration, and content-specific synchronization between frontal and early visual areas.