The study of visual processing and abnormalities due to lesions of cortical structures sheds light on visual awareness/consciousness and may help us to better understand consciousness. We report on clinical observations and psychophysical testing of ...

The bedside diagnosis of vegetative and minimally conscious patients is extremely challenging, and prediction of individual long-term outcome remains difficult. State-of the art neuroimaging methods could help disentangle complex cases and offer new ...

Recent evidence has suggested that functional neuroimaging may play a crucial role in assessing residual cognition and awareness in brain injury survivors. In particular, brain insults that compromise the patient’s ability to produce motor output may ...

Objective: In this paper, we propose a body of techniques for the estimation of rapidly changing connectivity relationships between EEG signals estimated in cortical areas, based on the use of adaptive multivariate autoregressive modeling (AMVAR) for the ...

The objective of the present study was to evaluate patterns of implicit processing in a task where the acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge occurs simultaneously. The number reduction task (NRT) was used as having two levels of organization, ...

Frequency-domain techniques describe oscillations as a fundamental behavior of neurons and brain signals. Oscillations synchronize over large portions of cortex and mediate in the spatiotemporally coherent activation of neuron assemblies required for ...

The vegetative state is characterized by the absence of awareness, voluntary or otherwise purposeful behavioral responses to external stimuli, and communication in the severely brain damaged. It is thought to result from an anatomical/functional ...

The purpose of the study was to identify significant changes in heart rate variability (an emerging descriptor of emotional conditions; HRV) concomitant to complex auditory stimuli with emotional value (music). In healthy controls, traumatic brain injured ...

The EEG slow-wave activity (SWA) organization in temporal cycles with an exponential trend of attenuation over the wakefulness-sleep cycle is thought to reflect synaptic homeostasis. Ten subjects in a vegetative state as a result of traumatic brain injury ...

Neuromotor rehabilitation, typically seen with stroke patients, is usually mistakenly focused on the recovery of movements while disregarding the insufficient or missing awareness of the affected part of the body. Thus, the functional recovery of ...

Over 20 years ago, ) suggested that consciousness may be described as a manifestation of deterministic chaos in the brain/mind. To analyze EEG-signal complexity, we used Higuchi’s fractal dimension in time domain and symbolic ...

This paper proposes a theoretical approach to explain the characteristic empirical interdependence between the states of arousal (representing the level of consciousness) and EEG activity. Applying a quantum transition probability model to the brain’s ...

The cognitive problem is how a given sensorial input elicits a decision. Since the neuron dynamics are affected by deterministic chaos, information is lost over the course of time. Control of chaos reduces such a loss rate by adding extra degrees of ...