Awarded projects

The goal of this project is to study whether the neurons in your brain need to be spiking for you to be conscious. Answering this question has major public health consequences for administering anesthesia, treating people with brain injuries, and understanding what happens in the brain during near-death experiences.

In this proof-of-concept study, we analyzed three existing EEG datasets where 40 participants performed an active face perception task, an active visual oddball task, and a passive auditory oddball task. We computed the perturbational complexity index (PCIst) and Lempel-ziv complexity (LZc) for every trial and analyzed the results using Bayesian mixed-effects models. We found that i) PCIst was higher for meaningful visual stimuli but that LZc could be higher or lower; i) PCIst was higher for rare visual stimuli but LZc was lower; and ili) PCIst was higher for rare auditory stimuli but LZc did not discriminate rare vs. frequent auditory stimuli.