Consciousness articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sleepwalking and related parasomnias are associated with partial awakenings out of non-rapid eye movement sleep. Here the authors show that when sleepwalkers have dream-like experiences during their episodes, they display brain activity patterns that resemble those previously described for dreams.

    • Jacinthe Cataldi
    • , Aurélie M. Stephan
    •  & Francesca Siclari

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Whether visual illusions and mental imagery are similarly represented in visual cortex is not well understood. Here, the authors show that imagery content is mainly detectable in deep layers of V1, whereas illusory content is decodable mainly from superficial layers.

    • Johanna Bergmann
    • , Lucy S. Petro
    •  & Lars Muckli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Serotonin 5-HT2A receptor signaling mechanisms associated with predicting psychedelic potential remain elusive. Using 5-HT2A-selective β-arrestin-biased ligands, here the authors show that a threshold level of 5-HT2A-Gq efficacy and not β-arrestin recruitment is associated with psychedelic potential.

    • Jason Wallach
    • , Andrew B. Cao
    •  & John D. McCorvy

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neural mechanisms underlying ketamine-induced altered states of consciousness are not well understood. Here, the authors show that depersonalization and dissociative amnesia related to ketamine have opposing effects on the activity of the right anterior insula in response to social threat.

    • Laura M. Hack
    • , Xue Zhang
    •  & Leanne M. Williams

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neuroanatomical basis of consciousness is not fully understood. Here the authors show that a global state of consciousness might not depend on a specific brain region or location in Euclidean space; rather, it is linked to a low-dimensional dynamic pattern in topological space, as shown through the analysis of different experimental paradigms, imaging techniques, and species.

    • Ang Li
    • , Haiyang Liu
    •  & Bing Liu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The cerebral cortex has ongoing electrical activities with rich and complex patterns in space and time. Here, the authors use optical voltage imaging in mice and computational methods, relating these complexities to different levels of wakefulness.

    • Yuqi Liang
    • , Junhao Liang
    •  & Changsong Zhou

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Absence seizures impair consciousness by an unknown neuronal mechanism. Here, the authors find that a rat absence seizure model’s behavior and hemodynamics recapitulate previously reported characteristics of human absence seizures, and uncover four distinct patterns of neuronal activity in cortex and thalamus during consciousness-impairing seizures.

    • Cian McCafferty
    • , Benjamin F. Gruenbaum
    •  & Hal Blumenfeld

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dimensions of consciousness such as wakefulness or awareness are well established but have not been mapped to the brain. Here, the authors show that dimensions of consciousness are encoded in the functional geometry of the cortex.

    • Zirui Huang
    • , George A. Mashour
    •  & Anthony G. Hudetz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors show that current measures of metacognition are confounded with response caution, both in simulations and empirical data. They propose an alternative dynamic measure of metacognition.

    • Kobe Desender
    • , Luc Vermeylen
    •  & Tom Verguts

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The role of the prefrontal cortex in conscious perception is debated because of its involvement in task relevant behaviour, such as subjective perceptual reports. Here, the authors show that prefrontal activity in rhesus macaques correlates with subjective perception and the contents of consciousness can be decoded from prefrontal population activity even without reports.

    • Vishal Kapoor
    • , Abhilash Dwarakanath
    •  & Nikos K. Logothetis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Attentional lapses occur in many forms such as mind-wandering or mindblanking. Here the authors show different types of attentional lapse are accompanied by slow waves, neural activity that is characteristic of transitions into sleep.

    • Thomas Andrillon
    • , Angus Burns
    •  & Naotsugu Tsuchiya

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans consciously experience their surrounding environment and can reflect upon it. Here, the authors use single-neuron recordings, electroencephalographic recordings, and computational methods to show that both conscious experience and self-reflection are related to a common mechanism of evidence accumulation in the posterior parietal cortex.

    • Michael Pereira
    • , Pierre Megevand
    •  & Nathan Faivre

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cortical and subcortical neural activity supporting conscious object recognition has not yet been well defined. Here, the authors describe these networks and show recognition-related category information can be decoded from widespread cortical activity but not subcortical activity.

    • Max Levinson
    • , Ella Podvalny
    •  & Biyu J. He

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People spend much of their daily lives thinking about things that are unrelated to their immediate environment. Using fMRI, Kucyi et al. show that occurrence of these “stimulus-independent” thoughts can be predicted from a complex pattern of coordinated activity between distinct parts of the brain.

    • Aaron Kucyi
    • , Michael Esterman
    •  & Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans can unconsciously learn to gamble on rewarding options, but can they do so when it comes to their own mental states? Here, the authors show that participants can learn to use unconscious representations in their own brains to earn rewards, and that metacognition correlates with their learning processes.

    • Aurelio Cortese
    • , Hakwan Lau
    •  & Mitsuo Kawato

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Conscious task load modulates the unconscious processing of semantic interference between an invisible prime and a visible target in a double-Stroop paradigm, providing evidence that high-level unconscious processing requires attention.

    • Shao-Min Hung
    • , Daw-An Wu
    •  & Shinsuke Shimojo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neuronal populations in the temporal cortex fire show increased activity in response to face stimuli. Here, the authors show using human intracranial recordings that face perception involves anatomically discrete but temporally distributed response profiles in the human ventral temporal cortex.

    • Jessica Schrouff
    • , Omri Raccah
    •  & Josef Parvizi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How do diversity (entropy) and integration of activity across brain regions interact to support consciousness? Here the authors show that anaesthetised individuals and patients with disorders of consciousness exhibit overlapping reductions in both diversity and integration in the brain’s default mode network.

    • Andrea I. Luppi
    • , Michael M. Craig
    •  & Emmanuel A. Stamatakis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sense of agency (SoA) refers to the experience that one's own actions caused an external event. Here, the authors present a model of SoA in terms of optimal Bayesian cue integration taking into account reliability of action and outcome sensory signals and judging if the action caused the outcome.

    • Roberto Legaspi
    •  & Taro Toyoizumi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Visual objects from similar semantic categories present activity patterns that cluster together in higher visual areas. The authors show that conscious access differs between semantic categories and is driven by category-related visual features commonly associated with processing in higher level visual areas.

    • Daniel Lindh
    • , Ilja G. Sligte
    •  & Ian Charest

  • Article
    | Open Access

    NREM sleep in rodents is characterized by internal dynamics in the form of UP/DOWN states in the neocortex and SWRs in the hippocampus. Here, the authors report that a mean field model with excitable dynamics captures the transition probabilities between these states from rodent sleep data.

    • Daniel Levenstein
    • , György Buzsáki
    •  & John Rinzel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    When tracking a moving object, our eyes make smooth pursuit movements; however, tracking an imaginary object produces jerky saccadic eye movements. Here, the authors show that during lucid dreams, the eyes smoothly follow dreamed objects. In this respect, dream imagery is more similar to perception than imagination.

    • Stephen LaBerge
    • , Benjamin Baird
    •  & Philip G. Zimbardo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neuronal basis of spontaneous changes in conscious experience is unclear. Here, authors report nonselective medial frontal activity starting two seconds before a spontaneous change in visual perception, followed by selective medial temporal lobe activity, one second before the change.

    • Hagar Gelbard-Sagiv
    • , Liad Mudrik
    •  & Itzhak Fried

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans can identify a target picture even when presented within a rapid stream of stimuli. Here the authors report that the neural activity initially supports parallel processing of multiple stimuli around the target in ventral visual areas followed later by isolated activation of reported images in parietal areas.

    • Sébastien Marti
    •  & Stanislas Dehaene

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Though people are easily able to recall items in a category without mentioning a wrong exemplar, the mechanism underlying this ability is unknown. Here, authors use intracranial recordings to show that this ability is likely due to a selective increase in baseline neuronal activity in category-specific regions.

    • Yitzhak Norman
    • , Erin M. Yeagle
    •  & Rafael Malach

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