ArticleBrain : a journal of neurology2021
How do the blind 'see'? The role of spontaneous brain activity in self-generated perception.
Article in Brain : a journal of neurology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 45 citations in OpenAlex.
- The reading brain - Transforming vision into language.Progress in neurobiology · 2026Review
- Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) in Diabetes: A Focused and Mechanistic Review of Symptom and Function Outcomes.Journal of clinical medicine · 2025Review
- Adaptive proximity to criticality underlies amplification of ultra-slow fluctuations during free recall.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- From Touch to Mental Imagery: The Embodied Aesthetic Experience of Late-Blind People Engaged in the Tactile Exploration of Enrico Castellani's Pseudo-Braille Surface.Culture, medicine and psychiatry · 2025Article
- Visual cortical activity in Charles Bonnet syndrome: testing the deafferentation hypothesis.Journal of neurology · 2025Article
- Filling in the Blind Spot: Integrating Charles Bonnet Syndrome Screening in Ophthalmology.Clinical ophthalmology (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2025Review
- Visual hallucinations induced by Ganzflicker and Ganzfeld differ in frequency, complexity, and content.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Expectation Cues and False Percepts Generate Stimulus-Specific Activity in Distinct Layers of the Early Visual Cortex.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- A single case neuroimaging study of tickertape synesthesia.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Subjective signal strength distinguishes reality from imagination.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Pattern forming mechanisms of color vision.Network neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2023Article
- Modelling perception as a hierarchical competition differentiates imagined, veridical, and hallucinated percepts.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2023Article
- Comorbidities in Friedreich ataxia: incidence and manifestations from early to advanced disease stages.Neurological sciences : official journal of the Italian Neurological Society and of the Italian Society of Clinical Neurophysiology · 2022Observational
- The Role of the Inner Nuclear Layer for Perception of Persisting Tiling Inside a Monocular Scotoma.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- The impact of visual dysfunctions in recent-onset psychosis and clinical high-risk state for psychosis.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2022Article
- Decoding cognition from spontaneous neural activity.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2022Review
- Article
- Oculomics in Schizophrenia Research.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2021Article
- Comparing stimulus-evoked and spontaneous response of the face-selective multi-units in the human posterior fusiform gyrus.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2021Article
- Local neuronal relational structures underlying the contents of human conscious experience.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2021Review
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 5 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Spontaneous activity of the human brain has been well documented, but little is known about the functional role of this ubiquitous neural phenomenon. It has previously been hypothesized that spontaneous brain activity underlies unprompted (internally generated) behaviour. We tested whether spontaneous brain activity might underlie internally-generated vision by studying the cortical visual system of five blind/visually-impaired individuals who experience vivid visual hallucinations (Charles Bonnet syndrome). Neural populations in the visual system of these individuals are deprived of external input, which may lead to their hyper-sensitization to spontaneous activity fluctuations. To test whether these spontaneous fluctuations can subserve visual hallucinations, the functional MRI brain activity of participants with Charles Bonnet syndrome obtained while they reported their hallucinations (spontaneous internally-generated vision) was compared to the: (i) brain activity evoked by veridical vision (externally-triggered vision) in sighted controls who were presented with a visual simulation of the hallucinatory streams; and (ii) brain activity of non-hallucinating blind controls during visual imagery (cued internally-generated vision). All conditions showed activity spanning large portions of the visual system. However, only the hallucination condition in the Charles Bonnet syndrome participants demonstrated unique temporal dynamics, characterized by a slow build-up of neural activity prior to the reported onset of hallucinations. This build-up was most pronounced in early visual cortex and then decayed along the visual hierarchy. These results suggest that, in the absence of external visual input, a build-up of spontaneous fluctuations in early visual cortex may activate the visual hierarchy, thereby triggering the experience of vision.
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