Abstract
The scope of human consciousness includes states departing from what most of us experience as ordinary wakefulness. These altered states of consciousness constitute a prime opportunity to study how global changes in brain activity relate to different varieties of subjective experience. We consider the problem of explaining how global signatures of altered consciousness arise from the interplay between large-scale connectivity and local dynamical rules that can be traced to known properties of neural tissue. For this purpose, we advocate a research program aimed at bridging the gap between bottom-up generative models of whole-brain activity and the top-down signatures proposed by theories of consciousness. Throughout this paper, we define altered states of consciousness, discuss relevant signatures of consciousness observed in brain activity, and introduce whole-brain models to explore the biophysics of altered consciousness from the bottom-up. We discuss the potential of our proposal in view of the current state of the art, give specific examples of how this research agenda might play out, and emphasize how a systematic investigation of altered states of consciousness via bottom-up modeling may help us better understand the biophysical, informational, and dynamical underpinnings of consciousness.
Highlights
Consciousness has been a puzzle beyond the scope of natural science for centuries; the significant progress seen during the last 30 years of research suggests that a rigorous scientific understanding of consciousness is possible [1,2,3]
They represent a valuable tool to narrow the space of mechanistic explanations compatible with the observed neuroimaging data, including data acquired from subjects undergoing different altered states of consciousness
We do not expect that the time series generated by computational models directly correspond to their empirical counterparts; we can expect a match for statistical observables. This motivates our study of altered states of consciousness, since their extended temporal duration guarantees the possibility of extracting robust statistical characterizations from multivariate neuroimaging recordings
Summary
Consciousness has been a puzzle beyond the scope of natural science for centuries; the significant progress seen during the last 30 years of research suggests that a rigorous scientific understanding of consciousness is possible [1,2,3]. While we do not know whether consciousness may be instantiated in other physical systems, we certainly do know that it is instantiated in the human brain, and all theoretical models of consciousness should be consistent with the low-level biophysical details of the brain to be considered acceptable In light of this potential under-determination, it is difficult to decide whether the different theories currently dominating the field are competing (in the sense of predicting mutually contradictory empirical findings) or convergent (in spite of being formulated from disparate perspectives). Altered states of consciousness are temporally extended and typically (but not always) reversible They are not defined by the presence of specific subjective experiences, but instead by general and qualitative modifications to the contents of consciousness, including their experienced intensity [17].
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