NeuroImage
May 15, 2025
Aya Khalaf, Erick Lopez, Jian Li et al.
6 citations
Subcortical arousal systems help control sustained changes in attention and conscious awareness, and recent studies suggest they also influence short-term dynamic modulation of visual attention, but their role across sensory modalities is unclear. Analyzing fMRI data from 1561 participants performing visual, auditory, tactile, and taste perception tasks, a shared circuit of subcortical arousal systems was identified. This circuit shows early transient increases in activity in the midbrain reticular formation and central thalamus across all sensory modalities, with less consistent increases in the pons, hypothalamus, basal forebrain, and basal ganglia. Identifying these networks is critical for understanding normal attention and consciousness and may aid subcortical targeting for therapeutic neuromodulation.
NeuroImage
April 15, 2025
Dmitri Filimonov, Saana Lenkkeri, Mika Koivisto et al.
6 citations
The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) for auditory awareness include auditory awareness negativity (AAN) and late positivity (LP), but it is unclear which is the true NCC. By inducing simple auditory hallucinations through a Pavlovian conditioning paradigm, where participants rated near-threshold tones and stimulus-absent trials, AAN appeared as an early event-related potential difference between aware and unaware stimuli, suggesting it is a genuine NCC for auditory consciousness. Late positivity was absent in these hallucinations, indicating it may not be essential for auditory awareness.
NeuroImage
October 17, 2022
Natália Bezerra Mota, Ernesto Soares, Edgar Altszyler et al.
5 citations
Visual and emotional aspects of waking memories follow different paths as people fall asleep. Healthy adults viewed an emotional image, then were awakened seconds to minutes later during wakefulness, N1, or N2 sleep stages. Semantic similarity between the image and subsequent hypnagogic imagery—the 'image residue'—persisted and even increased during N1 sleep, lasting longer with more time in that stage. In contrast, the emotional tone of the image—the 'affect residue'—gradually faded as sleep progressed, becoming neutralized and reaching its lowest point during N2. Brain theta power (4.5–6.5 Hz) during N1 was inversely related to image residue. These findings suggest that visual content and strong negative emotions may decouple at sleep onset, possibly aiding emotional processing.
NeuroImage
June 1, 2025
Dila Suay, Helena D Aicher, Micheal Kometer et al.
4 citations
A psychedelic formulation combining DMT and harmine, inspired by ayahuasca, altered brain responses to faces in 30 healthy men. It increased early visual reactivity (P1 wave) and disrupted face-structural encoding (N170 wave) for all face types. Crucially, it reduced the neural distinction between self and other faces in the P300 wave, while familiar-face processing remained stable. Harmine alone did not produce these effects. The findings suggest psychedelics can reorganize self-related neural dynamics, potentially promoting cognitive flexibility and offering therapeutic benefits for conditions involving rigid self-focus, such as depression and social anxiety.
NeuroImage
July 1, 2025
Daniel Suchý, Roozbeh Behroozmand, Henry Railo
3 citations
Vocal responses to unexpected changes in auditory feedback occur even when speakers are unaware of the change. In 30 participants, individually calibrated pitch shifts were applied during vocalization, and after each trial participants reported whether they consciously detected the shift. Compensatory vocal adjustments were present on trials where the shift went unnoticed. Conscious detection of the shift led to larger vocal responses roughly 500-700 milliseconds later and was associated with early (auditory awareness negativity) and late (late positivity) brain signals. Source localization linked conscious detection to increased activity in temporal, frontal, and parietal cortical networks involved in speech motor control. The findings suggest that consciousness modulates the magnitude and neural correlates of speech feedback control.
NeuroImage
November 19, 2025
Sebastian Ehmann, Idil Sezer, Arielle S Keller et al.
2 citations
Attention regulation is a core mechanism of mindfulness meditation. Long-term meditation enhances trait-level improvements in executive attention, sustained attention, orienting, and reduces the attentional blink. Preliminary evidence also shows improvements in response inhibition, alertness, and less mind-wandering. Alertness benefits most from long-term and intensive practice. Attention-based techniques outperform non-attention-based ones, while observe-and-release techniques aid orienting and detection of closely spaced stimuli. These findings suggest that meditation enhances attention according to training specificity, but meditative development is non-linear and multidimensional, requiring balanced cultivation of multiple faculties. Methodological limitations, such as heterogeneous designs and insufficient state-trait differentiation, complicate interpretations.
NeuroImage
July 18, 2025
Xin Wen, Yu Chang, Sijie Li et al.
1 citation
A new measure called Φcopula, which uses a Gaussian copula approach to estimate integrated information, outperforms common estimators by maintaining the lowest bias and mean squared error even in non-Gaussian high-dimensional systems. Applied to electroencephalographic data across awake, propofol-induced unresponsive, and NREM sleep states, alpha-band Φcopula significantly decreased during both anesthesia and sleep. Φcopula-based classifiers distinguished arousal states more accurately than functional connectivity and network efficiency measures. The dorsal attention network and default mode network contributed most to Φcopula, with the cingulate and posterior cortices showing the greatest contributions. The posterior cortex, especially the posterior cingulate cortex, appears critical for arousal-related information integration and consciousness.
NeuroImage
January 1, 2025
Jisub Bae, Koeun Jung, Oliver James et al.
1 citation
Perceptual integration of an illusory triangle from pacman-shaped inducers depends on how consciously the inducers are perceived. Using electroencephalography and multivariate pattern analysis, the authors found that posterior and central brain areas initially used a dynamic neural code and later switched to a stable one. The transition to stable coding occurred later and eventually disappeared as conscious access decreased. Anterior areas primarily used stable neural coding, which weakened with decreasing conscious access but increased at below-median visibility and persisted even when stimulus awareness was minimal. These results show distinct spatiotemporal neural dynamics for perceptual integration based on conscious access, with anterior areas uniquely processing integrated shape information especially under low subjective visibility.
NeuroImage
June 10, 2026
Fran Hancock, Rachael Kee, Fernando Rosas et al.
Flow—a state of effortless immersion often experienced during video games—shows a moderate inverse relationship with global brain entropy, meaning the brain is less disordered during flow than during boredom or frustration. Synchronization and metastability do not explain flow. Boredom and frustration each display distinct patterns of brain dynamics. These findings integrate earlier observations about prefrontal activity and network synchrony into a single dynamical-systems framework, identifying complexity-based markers that could help map the neural basis of media-related benefits.
NeuroImage
February 4, 2026
Gabriel Della Bella, Agustina Velez Picatto, Dante Sebastián Galván Rial et al.
A participant who can reliably enter a self-induced non-ordinary state of consciousness (NOC) characterized by vivid imagery, altered bodily perception, and a sense of unity underwent 20 fMRI sessions. Compared to a control group, during the transition into the NOC state, functional connectivity became more variable, indicating temporary destabilization of network organization. In the NOC state, connectivity between brain networks broadly decreased, especially visual cortex coupling with auditory, sensorimotor, and other regions, while frontoparietal and salience networks increased coupling with precuneus and temporal areas, matching reports of inward attention and absorption. Entropy and complexity measures tracked the experience and returned to baseline afterward.
NeuroImage
February 4, 2026
Chun-Yan Wang, Dong-Dong Zhou
EEG microstate sequences, which reflect brief patterns of brain activity, show precise temporal rhythms across theta, alpha, beta, and gamma frequency bands. These rhythms persist during both wakefulness and reversible unconsciousness induced by anesthesia or deep sleep. The periodic patterns arise from repeating multimer structures and the duration of each microstate, as shown by surrogate data analysis and a generative model. During deep sedation and N3 sleep, beta-band microstates specifically increase in peak power and shift to a lower center frequency. A new algorithm extracted these multimer sequences, revealing distinct frequency-dependent changes during unconsciousness that point to a shift toward specific dynamical brain regimes. The findings offer potential neurophysiological biomarkers for assessing consciousness.
NeuroImage
January 29, 2026
Dmitri Filimonov, Mika Koivisto, Antti Revonsuo
The most reliable brain-activity markers of visual consciousness, measured with EEG, are an early component called visual awareness negativity (VAN) and a later component called late positivity (LP). Three prior reviews concluded that VAN is specifically tied to awareness, while LP also reflects other mental processes. This review of 53 new studies published since 2020 confirms that VAN remains the most robust neural correlate of visual consciousness, whereas LP is not uniquely linked to consciousness. However, questions remain about how VAN relates to attention and other physiological factors.
NeuroImage
June 1, 2026
David J Acunzo, Andrea H Denton, Marina Weiler et al.
A systematic review of 143 reports on the neural correlates of extra-sensory perception (ESP) finds that definitive conclusions remain premature. Studies are categorized into explicit paradigms (assessing psi via overt responses) and implicit paradigms (assessing psi via neurophysiology alone). Most work used EEG (91%), followed by fMRI (5%). Recurrent methodological limitations include small sample sizes, inadequate multiple-comparison control, and analytical flexibility. Explicit paradigms rarely showed above-chance behavior, yet neural analyses were often conducted. Implicit paradigms reported heterogeneous findings that were seldom replicated. Potential leads for future research include alpha-band power in forced-choice designs and a target-related negative slow wave in event-related designs.
NeuroImage
August 15, 2024
Zepeng Fang, Yuanyuan Dang, Xiaoli Li et al.
Neural activity related to visual awareness shows a bimodal latency distribution, with early and late responses in distinct brain regions, except in the lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC), which contains both. This suggests the lPFC links phenomenal and access consciousness, though the division is not as simple as previously thought. In four patients with bilateral prefrontal electrodes, early awareness-related activity was only on the opposite side of the brain, while late activity appeared on both sides. Information flowed from early to late sites. These intracranial recordings provide the first local field potential evidence for distinct neural correlates of phenomenal and access consciousness, clarifying their spatiotemporal dynamics.
NeuroImage
February 11, 2023
Andrea I. Luppi, Pedro A.M. Mediano, Fernando E. Rosas et al.
High-level brain functions are thought to arise from coordinated activity across neural systems, but this has been hard to test empirically. Using a framework called Integrated Information Decomposition, which quantifies emergence in dynamical systems, the authors analyzed functional MRI data and found that emergent and hierarchical neural dynamics are significantly reduced in chronically unresponsive patients with severe brain injury. Emergence capacity was positively correlated with hierarchical organization in brain activity. Combining network control theory and whole-brain modeling, the authors show that reduced emergent and hierarchical dynamics in these patients can be explained by disruptions in the structural connectome. The results suggest that chronic unresponsiveness after severe brain injury may stem from structural damage to neural infrastructure needed for emergent brain dynamics.
NeuroImage
December 1, 2022
Torge Dellert, Sophie Krebs, Maximilian Bruchmann et al.
The P3b brain wave, long thought to be a signature of conscious perception, may instead reflect decision-making processes. In a study of 38 participants using a modified attentional blink paradigm—where seeing a first image briefly impairs awareness of a second—the early visual awareness negativity (VAN) appeared for seen versus unseen targets, but no enhanced P3b did, even when the second target was made distinct from distractors. The findings challenge the P3b as a neural correlate of consciousness and support the view that awareness arises during early sensory processing rather than later stages.
NeuroImage
November 1, 2022
Marie-Luise Roth-Paysen, Anne Bröcker, Maximilian Bruchmann et al.
During the attentional blink, when a second target is missed because it appears shortly after a first target, the neural correlates of consciousness are debated. Recording event-related potentials while participants viewed faces as the second target, the study found that the N170, visual awareness negativity, and P3b brain responses all increased for seen compared to unseen faces, regardless of whether the face appeared inside or outside the attentional blink window. These components also scaled linearly with subjective visibility. The results suggest that similar early and late mechanisms of graded perceptual awareness operate both within and outside the attentional blink, across perceptual and post-perceptual processing stages.
NeuroImage
March 1, 2021
Insa Schlossmacher, Torge Dellert, Maximilian Bruchmann et al.
Hearing spoken words while distracted, people who were told about the words became aware of them, whereas uninformed participants did not. Brain recordings showed that awareness of the words was accompanied by an early anterior negativity (auditory awareness negativity, AAN) regardless of whether the words were task-relevant. Late positive brain responses (P3-like) appeared only when participants had to actively respond to the words. These results suggest that early negative brain components, not late positive ones, mark conscious awareness across different senses, supporting the idea that early sensory processing is crucial for conscious perception.
NeuroImage
September 12, 2020
Sivayini Kandeepan, J. Rudas, Francisco Gómez et al.
Propofol, the most common general anesthetic, induces loss of consciousness through mechanisms that remain poorly understood. Using the generalized Ising model (GIM) to analyze fMRI data from healthy subjects listening to an audio clip, brain activity was modeled during wakefulness, mild sedation, deep sedation, and recovery. A novel inter-subject correlation technique captured common synchronization across participants. The GIM, modified to incorporate the naturalistic external stimulus, successfully fitted empirical task fMRI data at a temperature well above the critical temperature. This is the first mathematical modeling of human brain activity responding to real-life stimuli at different conscious levels, potentially aiding assessment of consciousness in patients with disorders of consciousness.
NeuroImage
May 15, 2019
Léa M Martinon, Jonathan Smallwood, Deborah McGann et al.
People spend a lot of time engaged in internally generated thoughts like mind-wandering, but studying these private experiences is methodologically difficult because they are not directly observable. This review argues that combining self-reports with neuroimaging techniques—such as EEG, ERP, and MRI—provides a more rigorous way to investigate patterns of ongoing thought. Imaging methods reveal the presence of covert mental states and help distinguish different aspects of experience, offering critical information that purely psychological approaches cannot. Triangulating brain data with subjective reports is essential for building an empirically grounded account of the stream of consciousness.
NeuroImage
March 1, 2019
Heonsoo Lee, D. Golkowski, D. Jordan et al.
Large-scale brain networks function near a critical state, and partial phase locking—a network science concept—shapes the characteristic functional connectivity and asymmetric anterior-posterior phase lag entropy (PLE) topography at this critical state, with low PLE for high-degree nodes and high PLE for low-degree nodes. Comparing PLE topography at criticality with electroencephalogram data from baseline consciousness, isoflurane anesthesia, ketamine anesthesia, vegetative state/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, and minimally conscious state shows that topographical similarity and strength of PLE differentiate these pharmacologic and pathologic states of consciousness. This provides a theory-based metric to quantify how far a perturbed brain network deviates from criticality, rather than merely determining critical or non-critical state.
NeuroImage
June 9, 2018
S. Prashad, Elizabeth S. Dedrick, F. Filbey
Cannabis users show increased baseline brain activity and connectivity compared to non-users, suggesting a loss of neural refinement and efficiency that may contribute to cognitive impairments. Electroencephalography (EEG) recordings from 17 cannabis users and 21 non-using controls matched for age and sex revealed that cannabis users had decreased delta power and increased theta, beta, and gamma power, indicating greater cortical activation during rest. They also exhibited increased interhemispheric and intrahemispheric coherence, reduced mean network degree, and increased clustering coefficient in specific brain regions and frequency bands. Measures of cannabis use correlated with these electrophysiological signals, which may help track intervention effectiveness.
NeuroImage
May 1, 2018
Gregor Wilbertz, Madhura Ketkar, Matthias Guggenmos et al.
Combining eye-tracking and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) improves the ability to decode which of two alternating perceptions a person is experiencing while viewing a bistable visual motion stimulus. Twenty participants viewed a plaid pattern that induces spontaneous perceptual switches and reported their perceptions. Using a support vector machine, multivoxel pattern analysis of fMRI data alone achieved 86% accuracy, eye-tracking alone 88% accuracy, and the combined approach reached 91% accuracy. This suggests that integrating brain and eye signals can reduce reliance on active verbal reports, which can confound studies of conscious perception, and may enable more effective no-report paradigms for investigating the neural correlates of consciousness.
NeuroImage
February 15, 2006
Kristen A McKiernan, Benjamin R D'Angelo, Jacqueline N Kaufman et al.
During demanding cognitive tasks, certain brain regions show reduced blood flow compared to resting states, a phenomenon called task-induced deactivation (TID). This study investigated whether TID reflects a suspension of internally focused thought. Using an auditory detection task with seven difficulty levels, participants reported task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) at intervals. Fewer TUTs occurred during harder conditions, and as TID magnitude increased across conditions, TUT frequency declined (r = 0.90). Four left hemisphere regions—posterior parieto-occipital cortex, anterior cingulate gyrus, fusiform gyrus, and middle frontal gyrus—showed strong correlations between TUTs and TID. These regions are linked to semantic and self-referential processing, supporting the idea that TID arises from suspending internal cognitive activity.