Castro, PabloLuppi, AndreaTagliazucchi, EnzoSanz Perl, YonatanNaci, LorinaOwen, Adrian M.Sitt, Jacobo D.Destexhe, AlainCofré, Rodrigo2025-05-212025-05-212024Castro P, Luppi A, Tagliazucchi E, Perl YS, Naci L, Owen AM, et al. Dynamical structure-function correlations provide robust and generalizable signatures of consciousness in humans. Commun Biol. 2024;7:1224. DOI: 10.1038/s42003-024-06858-32399-3642http://hdl.handle.net/10230/70445Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging evolves through a repertoire of functional connectivity patterns which might reflect ongoing cognition, as well as the contents of conscious awareness. We investigated whether the dynamic exploration of these states can provide robust and generalizable markers for the state of consciousness in human participants, across loss of consciousness induced by general anaesthesia or slow wave sleep. By clustering transient states of functional connectivity, we demonstrated that brain activity during unconsciousness is dominated by a recurrent pattern primarily mediated by structural connectivity and with a reduced capacity to transition to other patterns. Our results provide evidence supporting the pronounced differences between conscious and unconscious brain states in terms of whole-brain dynamics; in particular, the maintenance of rich brain dynamics measured by entropy is a critical aspect of conscious awareness. Collectively, our results may have significant implications for our understanding of consciousness and the neural basis of human awareness, as well as for the discovery of robust signatures of consciousness that are generalizable among different brain conditions.application/pdfeng© The Author(s) 2024. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.Neurociència computacionalConsciènciainfo:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s42003-024-06858-3info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess