Publications associées à Consciousness & the Small Network Argument

Subcortical correlates of consciousness with human single neuron recordings

Michael Eric Anthony Pereira, Olaf Blanke, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Fosco Bernasconi

Subcortical brain structures such as the basal ganglia or the thalamus are involved in regulating motor and cognitive behavior. However, their contribution to perceptual consciousness is still unclear, due to the inherent difficulties of recording subcorti ...

2024

Bodily self-consciousness as a framework to link sensory information and self-related components of episodic memory: behavioral, neuroimaging, and clinical evidence

Nathalie Heidi Meyer

The recollection of sensory information and subjective experience related to a personal past event depends on our episodic memory (EM). At the neural level, EM retrieval is linked with the reinstatement of hippocampal activity thought to recollect the sens ...

EPFL2023

Rituals of art and science to decompart(mentalize) knowledge

Bruno Herbelin

We here explore the potential of rituals in order to more fully comprehend the subjective mechanisms of listening, leading to a broader understanding of phenomenal consciousness (why and how do I know that I am experiencing something?). The originality of ...

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, and ISEA lnternational2022

A new empirical challenge for local theories of consciousness

Adrien Christophe Doerig

Local theories of consciousness state that one is conscious of a feature if it is adequately represented and processed in sensory brain areas, given some background conditions. We challenge the core prediction of local theories based on long-lasting postdi ...

2021

The perspectives of mapping and monitoring of the sense of self in neurosurgical patients

Bruno Herbelin, Olaf Blanke, Giannina Rita Iannotti, Hyeongdong Park, Pavo Orepic, Sixto Luis Alcoba Banqueri, Sophie Jacqueline Andrée Betka

Surgical treatment of tumors, epileptic foci or of vascular origin, requires a detailed individual pre-surgical workup and intra-operative surveillance of brain functions to minimize the risk of post-surgical neurological deficits and decline of quality of ...

SPRINGER WIEN2021

Evidence accumulation relates to perceptual consciousness and monitoring

Michael Eric Anthony Pereira, Olaf Blanke, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Fosco Bernasconi, Wenwen Chang, Mi Xue Tan

A fundamental scientific question concerns the neural basis of perceptual consciousness and perceptual monitoring resulting from the processing of sensory events. Although recent studies identified neurons reflecting stimulus visibility, their functional r ...

Nature Research2021

Response to commentaries on 'hard criteria for empirical theories of consciousness'

Michael Herzog, Adrien Christophe Doerig, Aaron Schurger

In consciousness research, we have a very large number of theories, which exceeds by far the number of theories in other fields. We recently presented a set of criteria for evaluating and comparing theories of consciousness, and then applied the criteria t ...

2021

Breathing is coupled with voluntary action and the cortical readiness potential

Olaf Blanke, Oliver Alan Kannape, Coline Barnoud, Hyeongdong Park, Henri Dan Trang

Voluntary action is a fundamental element of self-consciousness. The readiness potential (RP), a slow drift of neural activity preceding self-initiated movement, has been suggested to reflect neural processes underlying the preparation of voluntary action; ...

Nature Research2020

Postural Control and Consciousness and Their Applications to Lower-Limb Exoskeletons

Jemina Fasola

Human postural control requires high coordination and is distributed over the whole musculoskeletal and nervous systems. Hence, postural balance can be impaired due to various pathologies. Efficient rehabilitation programs and technological solutions are t ...

EPFL2020

First-person body view modulates the neural substrates of episodic memory and autonoetic consciousness: A functional connectivity study

Robin Mange, Bruno Herbelin, Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Olaf Blanke, Thomas William Arthur Bolton, Lucie Bréchet, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Baptiste Gauthier, Florian Lance

Episodic memory (EM) is classically conceived as a memory for events, localized in space and time, and characterized by autonoetic consciousness (ANC) allowing to mentally travel back in time and subjectively relive an event. Building on recent evidence th ...

2020

Thought consciousness and source monitoring depend on robotically-controlled sensorimotor conflicts and illusory states

Hannes Bleuler, Olaf Blanke, Pierre Progin, Masayuki Hara, Giulio Rognini, Polona Pozeg, Roy Salomon, Andrea Serino, Marco Solcà, Fosco Bernasconi, Herberto Dhanis Pedro De Barros Camacho, Giedre Stripeikyte

Thought insertion (TI) is characterized by the experience that certain thoughts, occurring in one’s mind, are not one’s own, but the thoughts of somebody else and suggestive of a psychotic disorder. We report a robotics-based method able to investigate the ...

2020

Multisensory perceptual awareness: Categorical or graded?

Olaf Blanke, Jean-Paul Noel, Nathan Quentin Faivre

Neural evidence suggests that mechanisms associated with conscious access (i.e., the ability to report on a conscious state) are “all-or-none”. Upon crossing some threshold, neural signals are globally broadcast throughout the brain and allow conscious rep ...

2019

The unfolding argument: Why IIT and other causal structure theories cannot explain consciousness

Kathryn Hess Bellwald, Michael Herzog, Adrien Christophe Doerig, Aaron Schurger

How can we explain consciousness? This question has become a vibrant topic of neuroscience research in recent decades. A large body of empirical results has been accumulated, and many theories have been proposed. Certain theories suggest that consciousness ...

2019

Peri-personal space encoding in patients with disorders of consciousness and cognitive-motor dissociation

José del Rocio Millán Ruiz, Serafeim Perdikis, Jean-Paul Noel, Andrea Serino, Maria Manuela da Silva Marques

Behavioral assessments of consciousness based on overt command following cannot differentiate patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC) from those who demonstrate a dissociation between intent/awareness and motor capacity: cognitive motor dissociation ...

2019

Torso-mounted Vibrotactile Interface to Experimentally Induce Illusory Own-body Perceptions

Hannes Bleuler, Olaf Blanke, Masayuki Hara, Giulio Rognini

Recent developments in virtual reality and robotic technologies have allowed investigating the behavioural and brain mechanisms that grounds self-consciousness in the multisensory (e.g. vision and touch) and sensorimotor processing of bodily signals. Yet, ...

IEEE2019

Coupling Inner and Outer Body for Self-Consciousness

Olaf Blanke, Hyeongdong Park

Although recent studies on self-consciousness emphasized the importance of bodily processing and multisensory integration, such research has focused solely on bodily signals originating from the outside of the body (i.e., exteroceptive bodily signals) or i ...

2019

Heartbeat-evoked cortical responses: Underlying mechanisms, functional roles, and methodological considerations

Olaf Blanke, Hyeongdong Park

The heart continuously and cyclically communicates with the brain. Beyond homeostatic regulation and sensing, recent neuroscience research has started to shed light on brain-heart interactions in diverse cognitive and emotional processes. In particular, ne ...

2019

Underlying mechanisms of episodic autobiographical memory and self-consciousness

Lucie Bréchet

Cognitive neuroscience has been examining consciousness associated with the subject, that is the self of the conscious experience and its related multisensory processing of bodily signals, the so-called bodily self-consciousness. Different line of research ...

EPFL2019

Building the Arrow of Time ... Over Time: A Sequence of Brain Activity Mapping Imagined Events in Time and Space

Baptiste Gauthier

When moving, the spatiotemporal unfolding of events is bound to our physical trajectory, and time and space become entangled in episodic memory. When imagining past or future events, or being in different geographical locations, the temporal and spatial di ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC2019

Quasi-Continuous Unconscious Processing precedes Discrete Conscious Perception

Michael Herzog, Adrien Christophe Doerig

Consciousness seems to be a smooth, continuous stream of percepts. We are aware of the world at each single moment of time. However, intriguing illusions suggest that the world is not continuously translated into conscious perception. Instead, consciousnes ...

2018