CORTICAL OSCILLATIONS AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Without conscious perception, the world we sense would not exist. Our brains process massive amounts of information from our environment, but only a fraction of it actually becomes part of our subjective reality. What’s happening in the brain when that information becomes part of our reality? 

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I and my colleagues at Perception and Brain Dynamics Lab at the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, MD) have explored this question through classical psychological experiments using ambiguous visual stimuli to distinguish subconscious and conscious brain activity, and have found that slow cortical activity predicts seconds beforehand whether you will see something in your visual field. We in the Pain and Passions Lab at Northwestern University (Chicago, IL) have also found that local low-frequency fluctuations of brain activity are a strong indicator of the anesthetized state. This work contributes to answering what I consider to be one of the most intriguing questions -- not only in neuroscience, but in science overall.

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 González-García, Carlos, Matthew W. Flounders, Raymond Chang, Alexis T. Baria, and Biyu J. He. "Content-specific activity in frontoparietal and default-mode networks during prior-guided visual perception." Elife 7 (2018): e36068.

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Baria, Alexis T., Brian Maniscalco, and Biyu J. He. "Initial-state-dependent, robust, transient neural dynamics encode conscious visual perception." PLOS Computational Biology 13, no. 11 (2017): e1005806.

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Baria, Alexis T., Maria V. Centeno, Mariam E. Ghantous, Pei C. Chang, Daniele Procissi, and A. Vania Apkarian. "BOLD temporal variability differentiates wakefulness from anesthesia-induced unconsciousness." Journal of neurophysiology 119, no. 3 (2018): 834-848.

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Chang, Raymond, Alexis T. Baria, Matthew W. Flounders, and Biyu J. He. "Unconsciously elicited perceptual prior." Neuroscience of consciousness 2016, no. 1 (2016).