2023/10/27 by Diego Candia‐Rivera, Federico Raimondo, Pauline Pérez +3 · 1 voice · 23 citations
Medicine · Neuroscience · Psychology · #Audiology #Auditory perception #Brain activity and meditation #Cognition #Computer science #Consciousness #Electroencephalography #Functional Brain Connectivity Studies #Heartbeat #Medicine #Minimally conscious state #Neural correlates of consciousness #Neuroimaging #Neuroscience #Perception #Persistent vegetative state #Psychology #Psychosomatic Disorders and Their Treatments #Traumatic Brain Injury Research #Wakefulness
paper · pdf · doi:10.7554/elife.75352
published in eLife 12 (eLife Sciences Publications Ltd)
openalex publication_date 2023/10/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Recent research suggests that brain-heart interactions are associated with perceptual and self-consciousness. In this line, the neural responses to visceral inputs have been hypothesized to play a leading role in shaping our subjective experience. This study aims to investigate whether the contextual processing of auditory irregularities modulates both direct neuronal responses to the auditory stimuli (ERPs) and the neural responses to heartbeats, as measured with heartbeat-evoked responses (HERs). HERs were computed in patients with disorders of consciousness, diagnosed with a minimally conscious state or unresponsive wakefulness syndrome. We tested whether HERs reflect conscious auditory perception, which can potentially provide additional information for the consciousness diagnosis. EEG recordings were taken during the local-global paradigm, which evaluates the capacity of a patient to detect the appearance of auditory irregularities at local (short-term) and global (long-term) levels. The results show that local and global effects produce distinct ERPs and HERs, which can help distinguish between the minimally conscious state and unresponsive wakefulness syndrome patients. Furthermore, we found that ERP and HER responses were not correlated suggesting that independent neuronal mechanisms are behind them. These findings suggest that HER modulations in response to auditory irregularities, especially local irregularities, may be used as a novel neural marker of consciousness and may aid in the bedside diagnosis of disorders of consciousness with a more cost-effective option than neuroimaging methods.