Consciousness is supported by near-critical slow cortical electrodynamics

DANIEL TOLKER ; IOANNIS PAPPAS; JANNA D.LENDER; JOEL FROHLICH; DIEGO M MATEOS; MARK D'ESPOSITO

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

National Academy of Sciences

Año: 2022

0027-8424

What changes in the brain when we lose consciousness? One possibility is that the loss of consciousness corresponds to a transition of the brain?s electric activity away from edge-of-chaos criticality, or the knife?s edge in between stability and chaos. Recent mathematical developments have produced tools for testing this hypothesis, which we apply to cortical recordings from diverse brain states. We show that the electric activity of the cortex is indeed poised near the boundary between stability and chaos during conscious states and transitions away from this boundary during unconsciousness and that this transition disrupts cortical information processing.