Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews
December 1, 2023
Thomas Andrillon, Delphine Oudiette
44 citations
Local sleep significantly influences behavior and cognition, highlighting its importance in both wakefulness and different sleep stages. Evidence from studies involving over 500 participants indicates that local sleep can occur independently of global NREM and REM states, affecting attention and consciousness. This phenomenon is linked to dreaming, inattention, and mind wandering. Understanding local sleep may unravel complex interactions within the brain's neurophysiology, offering insights into how sleep impacts metabolism and plasticity, while also addressing various pathological conditions related to sleep disturbances.
Current biology : CB
June 22, 2020
Matthieu Koroma, Célia Lacaux, Thomas Andrillon et al.
34 citations
During REM sleep, the brain flexibly amplifies or suppresses external sounds depending on eye movements. Using EEG to reconstruct speech from brain responses in a multi-talker environment, meaningful speech was amplified over meaningless speech overall. However, at the precise moments of rapid eye movements, meaningful speech was selectively suppressed. This shows that eye movements during REM sleep act as a gate, selectively blocking informative external stimuli while allowing them at other times, resolving a long-standing debate about whether the sleeping brain processes or ignores the outside world.
May 16, 2023
William Wong, Kátia C. Andrade, Thomas Andrillon et al.
21 citations
preprint
A new open-access database, DREAM, combines sleep magneto/electroencephalography (M/EEG) recordings with standardized dream reports to enable large-scale neurocognitive research on dreaming. The initial release includes 20 datasets from 561 participants and 2649 awakenings, each with at least 20 seconds of high-frequency M/EEG data and a classification of the subject's experience. Analyses demonstrate that features extracted from EEG can predict whether a person reports having had a conscious experience during both REM and NREM sleep. The database aims to overcome the limitations of small sample sizes and methodological variability in dream research, allowing new questions to be addressed at a scale unattainable by individual labs.
Trends in cognitive sciences
March 12, 2025
Thomas Andrillon, Antoine Lutz, Jennifer Windt et al.
14 citations
Moments during wakefulness that seem empty of any reportable thought, called mind blanking (MB), are not simply gaps in experience but distinct mental states with their own characteristics. This review maps MB by examining how people report it, its brain activity, and its links to related phenomena such as meditation and sleep. The authors propose that ongoing experience varies in richness, and contentless events represent a diverse category of mental states. They argue that recognizing MB as a reportable mental category is essential for a full understanding of how the mind works during wakefulness.
Nature communications
August 13, 2025
William Wong, Rubén Herzog, Kátia Cristine Andrade et al.
10 citations
A new open database, the DREAM database, combines standardized sleep magneto/electroencephalography (M/EEG) recordings with dream reports from 505 participants across 20 datasets, totaling 2,643 awakenings. Each awakening includes at least 20 seconds of high-resolution sleep EEG (≥100 Hz, ≥2 electrodes) and a classification of the sleeper's reported experience. Analyses showed that reports of conscious experiences during sleep can be predicted from objective EEG features in both REM and NREM sleep. The database aims to overcome limitations of small sample sizes and methodological variability in dream research, enabling larger-scale investigations of the neurocognitive basis of dreaming.
PNAS nexus
December 1, 2024
Emilia Fló, Laouen Belloli, Álvaro Cabana et al.
10 citations
Directing attention toward the body's internal signals (interoception) versus external sounds (exteroception) produces distinct brain activity patterns. Exteroceptive attention flattened overall brain wave power, while interoceptive attention reduced brain signal complexity, increased frontal connectivity and theta oscillations, and modulated the heartbeat-evoked potential (HEP). Classifiers using HEP features correctly identified the attentional state in 17 of 20 healthy participants; power spectral density features classified all 20. In five brain-injured patients, one with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome and one with locked-in syndrome showed willful modulation of the HEP, suggesting they could follow commands. These findings highlight how attention shapes sensory processing and may aid diagnosis in disorders of consciousness.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
December 30, 2025
Esteban Munoz-Musat, Arthur Le Coz, Andrew W Corcoran et al.
5 citations
Mind blanking—a state of apparent mental emptiness—produces distinct brain signatures that separate it from mind wandering and focused attention. In 62 participants performing a sustained attention task, mind blanking was associated with behavioral lapses, reduced fast brain oscillations and complexity over posterior electrodes, and decreased long-range connectivity compared to both mind wandering and on-task states. Event-related potentials showed disrupted visual processing beginning 200 milliseconds after a stimulus, suggesting a breakdown in conscious access to sensory information. Brain activity patterns predicted mental states on individual trials, revealing dynamics that subjective reports alone miss. These findings indicate that being awake does not guarantee consciousness of something; mind blanking reflects genuine gaps in the stream of thought, arising from disruptions in generating or accessing thought content.
October 17, 2024
Thomas Andrillon, Antoine Lutz, Jennifer Windt et al.
4 citations
preprint
Mind blanking (MB) refers to moments during wakefulness when people report no specific thoughts. This review maps MB by examining its reportable expressions, brain signatures, and links to meditative practices and sleep (white dreams). The authors propose a mechanistic account linking MB to changes at physiological, neural, and cognitive levels. They argue that ongoing experience varies in richness and that seemingly contentless events are distinct mental states with their own diversity, challenging the view of the mind as primarily content-oriented.
bioRxiv Preprint Server
July 16, 2025
Borjan Milinkovic, Anil K. Seth, Lionel Barnett et al.
2 citations
preprint
Consciousness depends on neural activity across many scales. A new measure, dynamical independence (DI), quantifies these multi-scale relationships. Applying DI to EEG data from people under three anaesthetics, the authors found that propofol and xenon—which abolish conscious report—produce more emergent but highly variable dynamic structure, indicating fragmented macroscopic organisation. Ketamine, which preserves dream-like states, shows reduced overall emergence but partial preservation of macroscopic structure similar to wakefulness. Regional brain contributions varied. The results reveal drug-specific reconfigurations of emergent dynamics, dissociate the amount of emergence from its organisation, and caution against equating emergence with consciousness level.
September 2, 2025
Zefan Zheng, Robert Chis-Ciure, Peter Thestrup Waade et al.
1 citation
preprint
Consciousness science is fragmented, with theories operating orthogonally and accumulating anomalies. The principle of recurrency—functional and architectural feedback loops—offers a unifying scaffold. All theories tacitly invoke feedback loops and can be re-expressed along a single axis of recursion. Four nested levels (cellular, local inter-areal, global, and lateral) map onto state, phenomenal content, manipulative access, and experiential similarity, tying evolved anatomy to phenomenon. The phenomenal-versus-access distinction dissolves into a graded cascade where deeper recursion expands reportable variables. Recurrence is evolutionarily favored, rebutting feed-forward objections, while brain-body loops ground selfhood. Clinically, targeting recurrent pathways promises new biomarkers and alleviation in disorders of consciousness.
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
January 13, 2026
Iván Mindlin, Carlos Coronel-Oliveros, Jacobo Sitt et al.
A biologically grounded inhibitory homeostatic plasticity rule embedded into the Dynamic Mean Field (DMF) model creates a Homeostatic Dynamic Mean Field (HDMF) model that dynamically tunes local excitation-inhibition balance. The HDMF reproduces statistical observables of brain activity as well as the original DMF, can sustain neuromodulatory perturbations without overhead computations, and generates unprecedented sleep-like slow-wave activity that can coexist with wake-like asynchronous dynamics, permitting modeling of dissociated states of consciousness such as parasomnias. A single homeostatic rule broadens the stability and expressiveness of the DMF, providing a unified platform for studying how local adaptive processes shape the diverse global dynamics of the human brain.
bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology
November 8, 2025
Lucie Berkovitch, Alexandre Salvador, Thomas Andrillon et al.
preprint
Low doses of ketamine, an NMDA-receptor antagonist, disrupt the ability to consciously perceive visual information in healthy people. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment with 21 volunteers, ketamine increased visual masking and reduced conscious perception of a digit. The N1 component of brain activity, an early marker of visual processing, was significantly reduced under ketamine and correlated with conscious access. Ketamine also induced psychotic-like and manic-like symptoms, but only the psychotic-like dimension was linked to impairments in conscious access. These findings suggest ketamine attenuates early visual brain responses, impairing conscious access, and that this mechanism differs in some ways from that seen in schizophrenia.
September 3, 2025
Paradeisios Alexandros Boulakis, Athena Demertzi, Jaco Sitt et al.
preprint
Consciousness research typically separates the study of states of consciousness (e.g., wakefulness, sleep, drug-induced states) from the study of contents of consciousness (what we are aware of). This chapter emphasizes the dynamic nature of both aspects. Life alternates between conscious and unconscious states like sleep and wakefulness, and within each state, conscious experience ranges from content-full to content-less. Similarities in reported contents across wakefulness and sleep are highlighted. The possibility of conscious experiences without specific content challenges the notion that being conscious always involves being conscious of something. Reviewing neural correlates of consciousness, the authors propose a potential convergence in studying conscious states and contents.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2025
Jasmine Walter, Thomas Andrillon, Jennifer M Windt
Spontaneous thoughts and experiences (STE), such as mind wandering and dreaming, may occur in patients with disorders of consciousness (DoC). The evidence is indirect and inconclusive, but suggests STE could affect diagnosis, which currently focuses on detecting consciousness. Understanding these experiences might also illuminate subjective experience and quality of life in DoC, about which little is known. Because diagnostic decisions can have life-or-death consequences, it is important to use measures sensitive to internally directed conscious experiences. Further research is needed to explore STE in DoC and its implications for quality of life.
Eur J Neurosci
November 18, 2024
Athina Tzovara, Thomas Andrillon, Katrin H. Preller et al.
Consciousness research has two main approaches: studying the global state of being conscious (e.g., during sleep, anesthesia, or brain injury) and studying the specific contents of consciousness (e.g., perceiving a particular stimulus). This special issue collects 12 articles that investigate mechanisms and measures of consciousness. Key findings include that during sevoflurane anesthesia in mice, neural complexity in the somatosensory cortex diminishes while firing rates and long-range connections decrease in deep cortical layers. Other work shows that during anesthesia, word judgments can be preserved while working memory is impaired. Auditory EEG responses during sleep have complexity and spectral slope modulated by sleep stages.
Cell reports
April 7, 2026
Nicolas Decat, Arthur Le Coz, Jade Sénéchal et al.
Mental experiences during wakefulness and sleep are not as distinct as commonly thought. Analyzing electroencephalography (EEG) from 92 participants during daytime rest, researchers collected 375 reports of mental content scored on bizarreness, fluidity, spontaneity, and wake perception. Clustering these reports revealed four distinct types of mental states. Crucially, all four types occurred across wakefulness, N1 sleep, and N2 sleep. EEG measures of spectral power, complexity, and connectivity differentiated these mental states independently of whether participants were awake or asleep. The findings indicate that the waking and sleeping brain can produce the same mental state, and that fine-grained brain dynamics shape the content of mental experiences.
Nature communications
June 29, 2021
Thomas Andrillon, Angus Burns, Teigane Mackay et al.
Attentional lapses—moments when focus drifts to unrelated thoughts (mind wandering) or the stream of consciousness halts (mind blanking)—are linked to localized slow-wave brain activity resembling sleep. Healthy participants performed a task while high-density electroencephalography recorded their brain activity; random interruptions prompted them to report whether their mental state was task-focused, mind-wandering, or mind-blanking. Slow waves preceded reports of both mind wandering and mind blanking, and their location distinguished between sluggish and impulsive behaviors as well as between the two types of lapses. The findings suggest that attentional lapses share a common physiological origin: the emergence of local sleep-like activity within the awake brain.