Widespread, perception-related information in the human brain scales with levels of consciousness

Abstract

How does the human brain generate coherent, subjective perceptions—transforming yellow and oblong visual sensory information into the perception of an edible banana? This is a hard problem. The standard viewpoint posits that anatomical and functional networks somehow integrate local, specialized processing across the brain to construct unique percepts. Here, we provide evidence for a novel organizational concept: we uncover task-specific information distributed across the human brain. We use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)-based decoding models to probe the presence of task-specific information. In doing so, we show that brain regions that are empirically almost entirely task-independent (considered to be "noise"—i.e., t-statistics ≈ 0—in standard univariate fMRI analyses) can decode various tasks, even without statistical learning tools. Thus, task-specific information is present and readily accessible throughout the neocortex, challenging the sensitivity of traditional linear, univariate analytical approaches. Remarkably, even subcortical structures and the cerebellum contain task-specific signals in voxels that would univariately be considered "noise". Finally, using data from an auditory study with different levels of sedation, we show that the widespread signal in regions remote from the primary and secondary sensory cortices (auditory cortex) depends on the level of sedation, suggesting the brain's widespread, task-specific information is related to perception rather than the encoding of the sensory stimulus. Our analysis uncovers task-specific and consciousness level-dependent information across the human brain, which we hypothesize to be the basis for coherent, subjective perceptions.

A replicable and generalizable neuroimaging-based indicator of pain sensitivity across individuals

“…This finding is in agreement with real brain lesion studies showing that lesions in key pain-related areas do not disrupt pain intensity perception (Knecht et al, 1996; Starr et al, 2009). Recent studies also demonstrated that pain can be decoded from nearly all brain areas (Vigotsky et al, 2022). Altogether, our observation supported the notion that pain is represented in a distributed neural system, rather than local and isolated regions (Coghill, 2020).…”