Automatic binding of basic sensory features requires consciousness
bioRxiv Preprint Server December 10, 2025 Zhili Han, Hao Zhu, Qian Chu et al. preprint
Conscious awareness is needed for integrating basic sensory features into coherent percepts. Using intracranial recordings in awake and anesthetized states, the study found that in the awake state, the brain automatically encodes individual auditory features (loudness and tone) and binds them together without attention, within a localized sensory cortical network. In the anesthetized state, encoding of single attributes is preserved, but binding is abolished, and anesthesia mainly affects later cortical processes after stimulus offset. These results suggest the functional boundary of consciousness lies between encoding and manipulation of basic sensory features at local cortical circuits, rather than global computations.