Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2025
Daniel Polyakov, P A Robinson, Avigail Makbili et al.
Neural field theory (NFT) can model brain activity across different states of consciousness. By fitting a corticothalamic NFT model to EEG data from healthy individuals and patients with disorders of consciousness, researchers identified correlations between NFT parameters and features of both experimental and simulated EEG. These correlations distinguish healthy from impaired consciousness and point to potential physiological biomarkers. The findings clarify how consciousness levels are represented in the NFT framework and highlight its value for in-silico experimentation in consciousness research.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2026
James W Sanders, Raphaël Millière, Ema Demšar et al.
The psychedelic compound DMT induces highly immersive experiences that often include encounters with seemingly sentient presences. Using micro-phenomenology, immersion under DMT was characterized as a structured continuum from subtle to gross forms. Twenty-three participants received 20 mg intravenous DMT during fMRI-EEG, followed by detailed interviews. Analysis yielded 125 phenomenological categories describing structural dimensions like sensory faculties, spatial organization, and self-world configuration. Bodily effects typically preceded visual and auditory ones, and perceived presences emerged only after multisensory integration and 3D spatial characteristics had developed, illustrating a hierarchical relationship between subtle and gross immersion. Perceived presences varied widely in sensory modality, semantic complexity, and relational mode, showing immersion as a dynamic, constructive process.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2026
María del Carmen Tejada, Antonia Zepeda, Alejandro Troncoso et al.
Empathy relies on bodily processes, but how Parkinson's disease (PD) disrupts this is unclear. Using a neurophenomenological approach, 42 people with PD watched pain-related videos while their self-reports, postural movement, heart rate, and electrodermal activity were recorded. Phenomenological interviews after exposure revealed two distinct empathic modes: Resonance Bodyssence, where emotions tightly couple with bodily sensations and movement, and Marginal Resonance Bodyssence, a more observational, cognitively mediated response with reduced bodily resonance. Integrating first-person data with quantitative measures shows that interindividual variability in motor and physiological responses in PD reflects distinct embodied empathic engagements, advancing an embodied account of empathy as a heterogeneous, dynamically enacted phenomenon.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2026
Valerie Van Mulukom
Consciousness can be understood as a dynamic continuum between two self-states: a reflective, narrative mode supported by the default mode network, and an experiential, affective-salience mode anchored in the salience network (anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex). The experiential self-state integrates interoceptive and exteroceptive signals into a coherent, non-propositional sense of being-here-as-subject, with sustained non-reflective meta-awareness. Within predictive processing, this state involves reduced precision-weighting of high-level self-referential priors, governed by dopaminergic, noradrenergic, and serotonergic mechanisms. This framework accounts for individual differences in mindfulness and absorption, and for conditions with dysregulated salience processing. Self-transcendent experiences—absorption, meditation, awe, mystical or religious experiences—are expressions of the experiential self-state.