Evidence map›Paper›PMID 31427539›Full record

Trial reportProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019

Awakening: Predicting external stimulation to force transitions between different brain states.

Gustavo Deco, Josephine Cruzat, Joana Cabral, Enzo Tagliazucchi, Helmut Laufs, Nikos K Logothetis, Morten L Kringelbach

Open access · hybridAbstract readClinical Trial
In one paragraph

Trial report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 129 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
129citing papers in PubMed, 2 pooled it
16.2field-weighted citation impact, top 1% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

129 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 284 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Pooled it
  2. Pooled it
  3. Sharp and smooth state transitions during resting state brain dynamics.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026
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  13. Hierarchical whole-brain modeling of critical synchronization dynamics in the human brain.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026
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  20. Disrupted Brain Hierarchical Organization in Alzheimer's Disease Progression.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025
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69 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.

4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

7 authors at 5 institutions in 6 countries.

Gustavo DecoCenter for Brain and Cognition, Computational Neuroscience Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 08018 Barcelona, Spain; gustavo.deco@upf.edu nklmpg@stanford.edu morten.kringelbach@psych.ox.ac.uk.
Josephine CruzatCenter for Brain and Cognition, Computational Neuroscience Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 08018 Barcelona, Spain.
Joana CabralDepartment of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 7JX, United Kingdom.ORCID 0000-0002-6715-0826
Enzo TagliazucchiInstitute for Medical Psychology, Christian Albrechts University, 24118 Kiel, Germany.
Helmut LaufsDepartment of Neurology and Brain Imaging Center, Goethe University, 60528 Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Nikos K LogothetisDepartment Neurophysiology of Cognitive Processes, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, 72076 Tübingen, Germany; gustavo.deco@upf.edu nklmpg@stanford.edu morten.kringelbach@psych.ox.ac.uk.
Morten L KringelbachDepartment of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 7JX, United Kingdom; gustavo.deco@upf.edu nklmpg@stanford.edu morten.kringelbach@psych.ox.ac.uk.
Aarhus University · DKGoethe University Frankfurt · DEInstitució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats · ESUniversitat Pompeu Fabra · ESUniversity of Manchester · GB

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

A fundamental problem in systems neuroscience is how to force a transition from one brain state to another by external driven stimulation in, for example, wakefulness, sleep, coma, or neuropsychiatric diseases. This requires a quantitative and robust definition of a brain state, which has so far proven elusive. Here, we provide such a definition, which, together with whole-brain modeling, permits the systematic study in silico of how simulated brain stimulation can force transitions between different brain states in humans. Specifically, we use a unique neuroimaging dataset of human sleep to systematically investigate where to stimulate the brain to force an awakening of the human sleeping brain and vice versa. We show where this is possible using a definition of a brain state as an ensemble of "metastable substates," each with a probabilistic stability and occurrence frequency fitted by a generative whole-brain model, fine-tuned on the basis of the effective connectivity. Given the biophysical limitations of direct electrical stimulation (DES) of microcircuits, this opens exciting possibilities for discovering stimulation targets and selecting connectivity patterns that can ensure propagation of DES-induced neural excitation, potentially making it possible to create awakenings from complex cases of brain injury.

Indexed as

BrainBrain InjuriesModels, NeurologicalNeuroimagingSleepWakefulnessDeep Brain StimulationFemaleHumansMalebrain statescomputational neuroscienceelectrical stimulationmetastatesmodeling

Identifiers

PMID31427539
PMCPMC6731634
OpenAlexW2969829800

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.