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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Mostly I am trying to post about new articles, but I came across this interesting passage from a 2005 article while continuing my epilepsy and consciousness reading.
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I don’t see Pekala’s self-report Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory (PCI) get used all that often, despite it being an interesting and useful questionnaire. Here the authors used it to measure consciousness changes during partial seizures. Among other things, they find individuals with partial seizure have consistent phenomenology during different seizure episodes.
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