ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Consciousness is supported by near-critical slow cortical electrodynamics.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 65 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
65 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- A methodological guideline for consciousness assessment via neural electrophysiological activity.Military Medical Research · 2025Guideline
- Is criticality a unified setpoint of brain function?Neuron · 2025Pooled it
- Neural complexity is increased after low doses of LSD, but not moderate to high doses of oral THC or methamphetamine.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2024Trial
- Psychedelics and the 'inner healer': Myth or mechanism?Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2024Trial
- The entropic brain today.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2026Review
- Comprehensive profiling of brain dynamics during anesthesia across phylogeny.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Spatial spectral narrowing in the corticothalamic neural field model across consciousness states.Biological cybernetics · 2026Article
- Multi-metric evaluations of acute psychedelic effects on fMRI brain entropy.Nature communications · 2026Article
- A week in the life of the human brain reveals stable states punctuated by chaotic-like transitions.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Adversarial AI reveals mechanisms and treatments for disorders of consciousness.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- 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 · 2026Article
- Critical Dynamics in the Association Cortex Predict Higher Intelligence in Typically Developing Children.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- A Virtual Clinical Trial of Psychedelics to Treat Patients With Disorders of Consciousness.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Cortical Mechanisms Contributing to Ketamine-Induced Dissociation.The Neuroscientist : a review journal bringing neurobiology, neurology and psychiatry · 2026Review
- The role of coupling among brain regions between the default mode network and the "Mesocircuit" Model in arousal in disorders of consciousness.Frontiers in neurology · 2026Article
- Toward a true understanding of consciousness: the explanatory power behind the non-physicalist paradigm.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- EEG criticality as a prognostic tool for functional outcomes in sedated pediatric intensive care patients.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2026Article
- Focal thalamic infrared neural stimulation propagates dynamical transformations in auditory cortex.Journal of neural engineering · 2025Article
- Spatiotemporal brain complexity quantifies consciousness outside of perturbation paradigms.eLife · 2025Article
- Aberrant E-I Balance and Brain Criticality in Major Depressive Disorder.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
5 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
13 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Mounting evidence suggests that during conscious states, the electrodynamics of the cortex are poised near a critical point or phase transition and that this near-critical behavior supports the vast flow of information through cortical networks during conscious states. Here, we empirically identify a mathematically specific critical point near which waking cortical oscillatory dynamics operate, which is known as the edge-of-chaos critical point, or the boundary between stability and chaos. We do so by applying the recently developed modified 0-1 chaos test to electrocorticography (ECoG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings from the cortices of humans and macaques across normal waking, generalized seizure, anesthesia, and psychedelic states. Our evidence suggests that cortical information processing is disrupted during unconscious states because of a transition of low-frequency cortical electric oscillations away from this critical point; conversely, we show that psychedelics may increase the information richness of cortical activity by tuning low-frequency cortical oscillations closer to this critical point. Finally, we analyze clinical electroencephalography (EEG) recordings from patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC) and show that assessing the proximity of slow cortical oscillatory electrodynamics to the edge-of-chaos critical point may be useful as an index of consciousness in the clinical setting.
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