Large-scale brain signatures of fluid dynamics and responsiveness linked to consciousness

Abstract

AbstractNeural bases of consciousness have been explored through many different paradigms and the notion of complexity emerged as a unifying framework to characterize conscious experience. To date, the perturbational complexity index (PCI), rooted on information theory, shows high performance in assessing consciousness. However, the mechanisms underpinning this perturbational complexity remain unclear as well as its counterpart in spontaneous activity. In the present study, we explore brain responsiveness and resting-state activity through large-scale brain modeling and prove that complexity and consciousness are directly associated with a fluid dynamical regime. This fluidity is reflected in the dynamic functional connectivity, and other metrics drawn from dynamical systems theory and manifolds can capture such dynamics in synthetic data. We then validate our findings on a cohort of 15 subjects under anesthesia and wakefulness and show that measures of fluidity on spontaneous activity can distinguish consciousness in agreement with perturbational complexity.