We highlight how markers such as pupil size, blinking, heart rate, and even sniffing can provide insights on the subjective experiences of others. We also discuss the broader ethical implications of accessing the consciousness of others. Check it out!

#Neuroscience #Consciousness #Perception

In our recent article published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Javier Gonzalez Castillo, @fmri-today.bsky.social (Peter Bandettini), and I explore the physiological measures that may serve to indicate consciousness - either alongside or in the absence of overt report.

Thank you to my collaborators for making this study possible! A great example of the power of teamwork in cognitive neuroscience research. @Victoria Gobo, @Shruti Japee @elimerriam.bsky.social @Benjamin Osborne @fmri-today.bsky.social @Tina Liu

Would love to hear your thoughts or questions!

One fascinating participant reported being blind in a portion of their visual field. However, eye metrics indicated processing of the images in the blind field. Further testing revealed blind field conscious awareness by visual stimulation that the participant did not even know they had!

Our findings provide evidence that eye metrics can serve as an indicator of conscious awareness and residual brain activity in cerebral blindness.

Cerebral blindness occurs due to damage in the visual processing areas of their brain.

Two major questions in cerebral blindness are:
(1) Does conscious awareness persist in the blind field?
(2) What residual neural processing occurs with or without blind field conscious awareness?

A big thank you to my collaborators who made this study possible: Victoria Gobo, Catherine Walsh, Joshua Teves, Diana Burk, Somayeh Shahsavarani, Javier Gonzalez-Castillo, and Peter Bandettini!

If you are interested or have questions, I am happy to help get you started with rtPupilPhase for your own research purposes. As a start, you can visit the GitHub repo linked in the paper with the rtPupilPhase scripts and documentation.

This work introduces an open source software - rtPupilPhase - we developed to track changes in pupil size in real time. We validated our method across several mammalian species, and we are hopeful that our method will prove useful for numerous research programs. Check it out!