Psychedelic Research

Cognitive neuroscience has learned a lot by having participants perform tasks. By engaging specific brain networks with a well-chosen task, we can make the relevant networks stand out against the background activity of the brain. In recent years, some smart scientists have begun to focus on the background activity itself. They’ve shown that low-frequency (i.e., <0.1 Hz) fluctuations in the fMRI signal have coherent patterns. These coherent patterns appear to pick out different networks in the brain and scientists have begun to use resting-state fMRI to study how different diseases affect brain networks.
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How does brain activity differ when you are aware of something vs. when you are not? This brief article by Melanie Boly and colleagues reviews this question. These researchers have done some interesting work on brain activity in people in persistent vegetative states, and this paper discusses neural activity associated with self-awareness.
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