bioRxiv Preprint Server
October 20, 2024
Peter Coppola, Adrian M. Owen, David K. Menon et al.
preprint
A new method captures the brain dynamics unique to each person's subjective experience. Using fMRI while people listened to a story awake and under different levels of anaesthesia, the approach tracks moment-to-moment changes in functional connectivity without assuming common brain states across individuals. The default mode network's dynamics were more dissimilar between conscious participants, reflecting personal engagement with the story. In contrast, the auditory and posterior dorsal attention networks showed higher similarity across conscious individuals, supporting more generalizable experiences. Conscious brain dynamics were more complex for individual-specific patterns but less complex for shared patterns.
bioRxiv Preprint Server
April 12, 2021
Peter Coppola, Lennart R.b. Spindler, Andrea I. Luppi et al.
preprint
The diversity of brain dynamics within small-world network topology, measured as sample entropy (dSW-E), consistently predicts levels of awareness across sedation and disorders of consciousness, even after accounting for underlying functional connectivity dynamics. Both subcortical and cortical areas show predictive value, but subcortical regions exhibit higher and more robust effect sizes. The dynamic reorganization of the functional information architecture, especially in the subcortex, emerges with awareness and offers explanatory power beyond the complexity of dynamic functional connectivity alone.
bioRxiv Preprint Server
June 7, 2026
Andrea I. Luppi, Dragana Manasova, Justine Y. Hansen et al.
preprint
Functional connectivity in the awake human brain is shaped primarily by cognitive co-activation—the tendency of brain regions to work together during mental tasks—more than by structural or molecular constraints. This predominance is systematically lost across five datasets involving pharmacological and pathological perturbations of consciousness (chronic disorders of consciousness; anesthesia with sevoflurane, propofol, or ketamine), when cognition is disconnected from the environment or abolished. During such states, the predictors of functional architecture shift away from cognitive co-activation and toward anatomical and molecular constraints.