ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2021
Does the Prefrontal Cortex Play an Essential Role in Consciousness? Insights from Intracranial Electrical Stimulation of the Human Brain.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled 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.
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.
Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 94 citations in OpenAlex.
- The convergent neuroscience of Christian prayer and attachment relationships in the context of mental health: a systematic review.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Pooled it
- Neural bases of the bodily self as revealed by electrical brain stimulation: A systematic review.Human brain mapping · 2023Pooled it
- Assessment of Vigilance Recovery in Rats Following Anesthesia Using a Touchscreen-Based Continuous Performance Task.Anesthesiology · 2026Article
- Review
- Supratentorial Brain Lesions in Unconscious Patients Map to a Common Human Brain Circuit.Annals of neurology · 2026Observational
- Methodological foundations for locating the neural correlates of low-level visual experience.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Naturalizing perceptual experience: the explanatory power of probabilistic computation and the holographic solution.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- From chemistry to cognition: the adaptive origins of consciousness under constraint.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Article
- Role of thalamus in human conscious perception revealed by low-intensity focused ultrasound neuromodulation.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Role of Thalamus in Human Conscious Perception Revealed by Low-Intensity Focused Ultrasound Neuromodulation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Association of Bidirectional Network Cores in the Brain with Perceptual Awareness and Cognition.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Consciousness Research Through Pain.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Association of bidirectional network cores in the brain with perceptual awareness and cognition.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex high-frequency transcranial magnetic stimulation for consciousness recovery after traumatic brain injury: a case series.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Theories of consciousness from the perspective of an embedded processes view.Psychological review · 2025Review
- Metacognition as a window into subjective affective experience.Psychiatry and clinical neurosciences · 2024Review
- Anesthesia and the neurobiology of consciousness.Neuron · 2024Review
- Consciousness and sleep.Neuron · 2024Review
- A mechanistic alternative to minimal sufficiency as the guiding principle for NCC research.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2024Article
- Why did humans surpass all other primates? Are our brains so different? Part 2.Dementia & neuropsychologia · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A central debate in philosophy and neuroscience pertains to whether PFC activity plays an essential role in the neural basis of consciousness. Neuroimaging and electrophysiology studies have revealed that the contents of conscious perceptual experience can be successfully decoded from PFC activity, but these findings might be confounded by postperceptual cognitive processes, such as thinking, reasoning, and decision-making, that are not necessary for consciousness. To clarify the involvement of the PFC in consciousness, we present a synthesis of research that has used intracranial electrical stimulation (iES) for the causal modulation of neural activity in the human PFC. This research provides compelling evidence that iES of only certain prefrontal regions (i.e., orbitofrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex) reliably perturbs conscious experience. Conversely, stimulation of anterolateral prefrontal sites, often considered crucial in higher-order and global workspace theories of consciousness, seldom elicits any reportable alterations in consciousness. Furthermore, the wide variety of iES-elicited effects in the PFC (e.g., emotions, thoughts, and olfactory and visual hallucinations) exhibits no clear relation to the immediate environment. Therefore, there is no evidence for the kinds of alterations in ongoing perceptual experience that would be predicted by higher-order or global workspace theories. Nevertheless, effects in the orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortices suggest a specific role for these PFC subregions in supporting emotional aspects of conscious experience. Overall, this evidence presents a challenge for higher-order and global workspace theories, which commonly point to the PFC as the basis for conscious perception based on correlative and possibly confounded information.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.