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Symposium

How Brain Dynamics shape human experience

04/10 – 10:30
Aula Magna – Entresuelo PABELLÓN 2 (Main Lecture Hall – Mezzanine, Building 2)

Jacobo Sitt
Paris Brain Institute

Understanding how dynamic patterns of brain activity give rise to subjective experience remains a central challenge in neuroscience. This symposium brings together four researchers who investigate the neural underpinnings of consciousness across various states, including wakefulness, sleep, and pathological conditions. By integrating theoretical frameworks with clinical applications, the session aims to elucidate the relationship between global brain dynamics and phenomenology.

Jacobo Sitt will introduce the general topic and weave the presenters talks in between.

Tristan Bekinschtein will present the brain signatures used in real world experiments with portable EEG, highlight the power of collecting hundreds of sessions on breathworks and also show the robustness of doing dose-response psychedelic work in Argentina. The combined use of experience tracing and EEG allows for a framework for neurophenomenology that is exemplified here by the brain dynamics of altered consciousness.

Vincent Taschereau-Dumouchel uses real-time fMRI and decoded neurofeedback to modulate brain patterns and subjective states actively. By decoding brain activity linked to specific feelings (like pain or fear) and feeding it back as neurofeedback, his approach can change underlying physiological processes and potentially reduce the felt intensity of these experiences without any conscious effort. This offers causal evidence tying brain dynamics to phenomenology and suggests novel interventions for clinical conditions (e.g. chronic pain, anxiety). It exemplifies the power of brain–machine interface techniques to illuminate mind–brain relationships.

Cecilia Forcato will explore how the minimal self — our basic sense of being an embodied subject — emerges from brain-body interactions beginning in early life. Drawing on studies with preterm infants and individuals experiencing depersonalization, she shows how disruptions in interoceptive integration can weaken the sense of self. Her work uses EEG and heartbeat-evoked potentials to highlight how neural responses to bodily signals underpin the coherence of selfhood. This developmental and translational perspective emphasizes that consciousness is not only brain-based but deeply rooted in the dynamics of embodied existence.

These four talks collectively showcase an innovative synthesis of theoretical and clinical neuroscience. The session offers an accessible overview of how brain dynamics across multiple scales link to subjective experience, making it relevant to neuroscientists across subfields. Emphasizing novelty and interdisciplinarity, it demonstrates that combining cognitive experiments, clinical studies, and neurotechnology can advance our understanding of consciousness and inspire new strategies to improve conscious states.

SPEAKERS

Tristan Bekinschtein  (CV)
Consciousness and Cognition Lab, University of Cambridge Title: “The neural dynamics of altered states of consciousness: lessons from psychedelics and hypoxic events”

Recent advances in high-temporal resolution neuroimaging, combined with novel tools for capturing subjective experience, allow us to trace how fluctuations in neural activity relate to the evolving contents of consciousness. In this talk, I present a series of studies employing Temporal Experience Tracing (TET), a neurophenomenological method that enables participants to retrospectively map the intensity of multiple experiential dimensions as continuous time series. Applied across both pharmacologically induced (DMT, psychedelics) and non-pharmacological (breathwork, physiologically induced hypoxia) Altered States of Consciousness, TET allows for fine-grained modeling of experience dynamics when integrated with their neural counterparts.
In high-dose DMT conditions, we observed rapid and structured shifts in experiential dimensions such as emotional intensity, visual complexity, and selfhood, which were tightly coupled with specific EEG neural dynamical markers. Notably, alpha oscillatory power and permutation entropy exhibited the strongest associations with subjective fluctuations, while Lempel-Ziv complexity, often heralded as a neural marker of psychedelic richness, showed weaker and less consistent correlations. Low-dose DMT revealed the power of the state of bliss and showed milder brain entropy and no negative experiences. Results from the breathwork-induced Altered States of Consciousness demonstrated similar mappings between neural signal diversity (e.g., LZ complexity and aperiodic spectral components) and positively valenced experiential clusters, including a dose response between neural aperiodic component and increasing hypoxic events).
Drawing also on large-scale TET data from meditation research, we illustrate how temporal profiles of experience can be computationally clustered to reveal recurring metastable experiential states and their transition dynamics. These converging findings support a model in which distinct neural features dynamically scaffold specific human experiences in altered states of consciousness, and demonstrate the power of temporally resolved neurophenomenology to bridge first- and third-person perspectives on consciousness.

Jacobo Sitt 
Inserm, Paris Brain Institute, France

Title: “Exploring global brain patterns dynamics, and their role in states and contents of consciousness”

In this presentation, I will explore the probabilistic associations between distinct recurrent global dynamic brain patterns (GDBP) obtained from fMRI data and clinically defined states of consciousness. Through a comprehensive analysis of functional neuroimaging data from both humans and non-human primates, I will demonstrate that conscious states are intricately linked to the dynamic exploration of a diverse repertoire of GDBP, characterized by a characteristic temporal scale of approximately 10 seconds. Specifically, I will discuss how conscious individuals, whether human or non-human primates, exhibit two distinctive groups of GDBP: (1) ‘High’ GDBP: These patterns involve robust long-range functional cortico-cortical communication, encompassing both positive correlations and anti-correlations between different brain areas, (2) ‘Low’ GDBP: These patterns, in contrast, are characterized by sparse and limited inter-areal communication. Interestingly, unconscious individuals, such as those under anesthesia or in a disorder of consciousness state, primarily express the latter, ‘low’ GDBP category. Furthermore, I will present recent findings demonstrating that the temporal sequence of GDBP also reflects the fine-grain dynamics of subjective experience. I will show results demonstrating the inter-subject synchronization of GDBPs across subjects that occurs only when subjects are attentive to audiovisual narratives. I will also show that the occurrence of specific modulates the subjects’ perceptual threshold, suggesting a direct relationship between ongoing whole brain dynamics and subjective experience.  In summary, this presentation underscores the critical role of GDBPs in understanding the neural basis of consciousness, highlighting their potential as a novel avenue for investigating subjective experiences across different states of consciousness.

Vincent Taschereau-Dumouchel  (CV)
Department of Psychiatry and Addictology, Université de Montréal
Title: “Dissociating conscious and unconscious affective processes using decoded neurofeedback”

Conscious emotional experiences are so tightly coupled with physiological and behavioral responses that such “objective” measures are often used interchangeably with subjective reports when developing treatments for emotional disorders. This is problematic because many lines of evidence now indicate that objective measures reflect unconscious defensive mechanisms that dissociate from the subjective experiences that patients are trying to avoid—and which typically motivate them to seek treatment. In this presentation, we will discuss a series of experiments aimed at further studying the dissociation between objective and subjective responses in the brain. Notably, we will discuss a series of closed-loop fMRI neurofeedback studies targeting machine-learning decoders of affective processes in the brain. We will show that causally manipulating specific brain representations can help further understand the dissociation between objective and subjective processes. We will specifically discuss two neurofeedback experiments that showed a selective modulation of physiological defensive responses without changing the subjective experience of fear. Conversely, we will discuss the results of a new neurofeedback study that modulated the subjective experience of pain independently from the brain activity associated with nociceptive processes. These results will be discussed in light of the higher-order theory of emotional consciousness and will help us devise a path forward to better target troubling affective experiences for therapeutic purposes.

Cecilia Forcato (CV)
Laboratorio de Sueño y Memoria, Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires (ITBA)
Title: “Disembodied Minds: Out-of-Body Experiences and the Neuroscience of Consciousness During Sleep”

Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are vivid phenomena in which individuals perceive themselves as separated from their physical body, observing the world from an external vantage point. These experiences, often reported during transitions between sleep and wakefulness, challenge traditional views of consciousness and embodiment. Despite their historical, cultural, and clinical relevance, OBEs remain poorly understood from a neuroscientific perspective.

In this talk, I will present recent findings from our lab combining phenomenological reports and electrophysiological recordings during sleep to investigate OBEs, sleep paralysis (SP), lucid dreams (LDs), and false awakenings (FAs). Our studies reveal that OBEs are associated with distinct spectral brain activity patterns, particularly increases in delta and reductions in fast-frequency bands (alpha, beta and low-gamma), suggesting a unique neurophysiological signature that distinguishes them from both wakefulness and canonical sleep stages. Importantly, we provide the first evidence of eye-movement markers during OBEs captured in-lab, enabling their precise temporal localization.

I will also discuss the emotional landscape of these altered states, showing that OBEs are experienced as more pleasant than SP oneiric perceptions, especially when self-induced, and may be preceded by identifiable precursory sensory cues, including tactile, auditory, and visual sensations, that open new avenues for controlled induction. Taken together, these findings support the idea that consciousness during sleep is not binary but dynamic, and that OBEs represent a meaningful and reproducible state of altered self-perception that bridges the neurophysiological and experiential domains.