ArticleFrontiers in psychology2019
Content-Free Awareness: EEG-fcMRI Correlates of Consciousness
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers.
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Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed, 68 citations in OpenAlex.
- The micro-phenomenology of Floatation-REST.BMC complementary medicine and therapies · 2026Article
- The neural correlates of shared and individual experience.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Machine Learning-Based Comparative Analysis of Subject-Independent EEG Data Classification Across Multiple Meditation and Non-Meditation Sessions.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- The Psychedelic Renaissance: A Catholic Perspective.The Linacre quarterly · 2025Article
- Striatal functional connectivity associated with Sahaja Yoga meditation.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Variations of autonomic arousal mediate the reportability of mind blanking occurrences.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Novel machine learning-driven comparative analysis of CSP, STFT, and CSP-STFT fusion for EEG data classification across multiple meditation and non-meditation sessions in BCI pipeline.Brain informatics · 2025Article
- The impact of frequency-specific music stimulation on consciousness in patients with disorders of consciousness.Frontiers in neurology · 2025Article
- How compatible are Western psychology and yoga psychology? Epistemology, concepts and localization.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Suspending the Embodied Self in Meditation Attenuates Beta Oscillations in the Posterior Medial Cortex.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Forgetting ourselves in flow: an active inference account of flow states and how we experience ourselves within them.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Documenting and defining emergent phenomenology: theoretical foundations for an extensive research strategy.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Whole-Brain Deactivations Precede Uninduced Mind-Blanking Reports.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Patients with Disorders of Consciousness: Are They Nonconscious, Unconscious, or Subconscious? Expanding the Discussion.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- Embodied strategies for public speaking anxiety: evaluation of the Corp-Oral program.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2023Article
- Mind blanking is a distinct mental state linked to a recurrent brain profile of globally positive connectivity during ongoing mentation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Changes in Subjective Time and Self during Meditation.Biology · 2022Article
- Beyond the veil of duality-topographic reorganization model of meditation.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2022Review
- Tackling the Electro-Topography of the Selves Through the Sphere Model of Consciousness.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Stable Consciousness? The "Hard Problem" Historically Reconstructed and in Perspective of Neurophenomenological Research on Meditation.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The minimal neural correlate of the conscious state, regardless of the neural activity correlated with the ever-changing contents of experience, has still not been identified. Different attempts have been made, mainly by comparing the normal waking state to seemingly unconscious states, such as deep sleep or general anesthesia. A more direct approach would be the neuroscientific investigation of conscious states that are experienced as free of any specific phenomenal content. Here we present serendipitous data on content-free awareness (CFA) during an EEG-fMRI assessment reported by an extraordinarily qualified meditator with over 50,000 h of practice. We focused on two specific cortical networks related to external and internal awareness, i.e., the dorsal attention network (DAN) and the default mode network (DMN), to explore the neural correlates of this experience. The combination of high-resolution EEG and ultrafast fMRI enabled us to analyze the dynamic aspects of fMRI connectivity informed by EEG power analysis. The neural correlates of CFA were characterized by a sharp decrease in alpha power and an increase in theta power as well as increases in functional connectivity in the DAN and decreases in the posterior DMN. We interpret these findings as correlates of a top-down-initiated attentional state excluding external sensory stimuli and internal mentation from conscious experience. We conclude that the investigation of states of CFA could provide valuable input for new methodological and conceptual approaches in the search for the minimal neural correlate of consciousness.
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