​​​Talk from Andrea Luppi - Saint John’s College, University of Cambridge

Short abstract:

Disentangling how cognitive functions emerge from the interplay of brain dynamics and network architecture is among the major challenges faced by neuroscientists. Pharmacological and pathological perturbations of consciousness provide a lens to investigate these complex challenges. In this talk, I will show how recent advances in the study of consciousness and the brain’s functional organization have been driven by a common denominator: decomposing brain function into fundamental constituents of time, space, and information. I will show how perturbations of consciousness induce convergent reconfigurations of the brain’s unimodal-transmodal functional architecture. However, loss of consciousness increases structural constraints on brain dynamics across scales, whereas psychedelics decouple brain function from anatomy. Decomposition approaches reveal the potential to translate discoveries across species, with computational modelling providing a path towards mechanistic integration.​