We highlight how markers such as pupil size, blinking, heart rate, and even sniffing can provide insights on the subjective experiences of others. We also discuss the broader ethical implications of accessing the consciousness of others. Check it out!

#Neuroscience #Consciousness #Perception

In our recent article published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Javier Gonzalez Castillo, @fmri-today.bsky.social (Peter Bandettini), and I explore the physiological measures that may serve to indicate consciousness - either alongside or in the absence of overt report.

Consciousness is private - our conscious experiences are inherently subjective. To infer someone else's consciousness, we typically rely on overt behaviors like language and body gestures. But sometimes these overt expressions are unreliable or absent altogether

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A concerning breach of the 1.5°C global warming threshold reminds us of the urgency to act. Let’s each play our part - big or small - in creating solutions for a sustainable future. www.newscientist.com/article/2463...

Congratulations to Dr. Kate Christison-Lagay and colleagues on this hard-fought publication reporting on auditory conscious perception with human intracranial recordings. Worth a look! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Always a good perspective reset when captured by human-scaled drama. This is a picture of Earth from ~3.7 billion miles away (Pale Blue Dot).

@emilyjacobs.bsky.social delivered an inspiring talk at NIMH earlier this week, presenting her + colleagues' research on brain changes during the menstrual cycle and pregnancy. I recommend exploring their latest paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thank you to my collaborators for making this study possible! A great example of the power of teamwork in cognitive neuroscience research. @Victoria Gobo, @Shruti Japee @elimerriam.bsky.social @Benjamin Osborne @fmri-today.bsky.social @Tina Liu

Would love to hear your thoughts or questions!

One fascinating participant reported being blind in a portion of their visual field. However, eye metrics indicated processing of the images in the blind field. Further testing revealed blind field conscious awareness by visual stimulation that the participant did not even know they had!

Our findings provide evidence that eye metrics can serve as an indicator of conscious awareness and residual brain activity in cerebral blindness.

Cerebral blindness occurs due to damage in the visual processing areas of their brain.

Two major questions in cerebral blindness are:
(1) Does conscious awareness persist in the blind field?
(2) What residual neural processing occurs with or without blind field conscious awareness?

I am very happy to share our latest pre-print on eye metrics (pupil size, blinking, and microsaccades) and conscious awareness in cerebral blindness! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A big thank you to my collaborators who made this study possible: Victoria Gobo, Catherine Walsh, Joshua Teves, Diana Burk, Somayeh Shahsavarani, Javier Gonzalez-Castillo, and Peter Bandettini!

If you are interested or have questions, I am happy to help get you started with rtPupilPhase for your own research purposes. As a start, you can visit the GitHub repo linked in the paper with the rtPupilPhase scripts and documentation.

This work introduces an open source software - rtPupilPhase - we developed to track changes in pupil size in real time. We validated our method across several mammalian species, and we are hopeful that our method will prove useful for numerous research programs. Check it out!

I'm thrilled to share the publication of our latest research article, "Cross-species real-time detection of trends in pupil size fluctuation" in Behavior Research Methods!

You can check out the paper here: link.springer.com/article/10.3...

#Neuroscience #Pupil #OpenSource