TY  - JOUR
A1  - Tagliazucchi, Enzo
A1  - Behrens, Marion
A1  - Laufs, Helmut
T1  - Sleep neuroimaging and models of consciousness
T2  - Frontiers in psychology
N2  - Human deep sleep is characterized by reduced sensory activity, responsiveness to stimuli, and conscious awareness. Given its ubiquity and reversible nature, it represents an attractive paradigm to study the neural changes which accompany the loss of consciousness in humans. In particular, the deepest stages of sleep can serve as an empirical test for the predictions of theoretical models relating the phenomenology of consciousness with underlying neural activity. A relatively recent shift of attention from the analysis of evoked responses toward spontaneous (or “resting state”) activity has taken place in the neuroimaging community, together with the development of tools suitable to study distributed functional interactions. In this review we focus on recent functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies of spontaneous activity during sleep and their relationship with theoretical models for human consciousness generation, considering the global workspace theory, the information integration theory, and the dynamical core hypothesis. We discuss the venues of research opened by these results, emphasizing the need to extend the analytic methodology in order to obtain a dynamical picture of how functional interactions change over time and how their evolution is modulated during different conscious states. Finally, we discuss the need to experimentally establish absent or reduced conscious content, even when studying the deepest sleep stages.
KW  - consciousness
KW  - sleep
KW  - fMRI
KW  - EEG
KW  - resting state
Y1  - 2013
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/51484
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-514842
N1  - Copyright: © 2013 Tagliazucchi, Behrens and Laufs. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ , which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and subject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party graphics etc.
VL  - 4
IS  - article 256
PB  - MDPI
CY  - Basel
ER  -