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Open Access Green as soon as Postprint is submitted to ZB.
Not with a "zap" but with a "beep": Measuring the origins of perinatal experience.
Neuroimage 273:120057 (2023)
When does the mind begin? Infant psychology is mysterious in part because we cannot remember our first months of life, nor can we directly communicate with infants. Even more speculative is the possibility of mental life prior to birth. The question of when consciousness, or subjective experience, begins in human development thus remains incompletely answered, though boundaries can be set using current knowledge from developmental neurobiology and recent investigations of the perinatal brain. Here, we offer our perspective on how the development of a sensory perturbational complexity index (sPCI) based on auditory ("beep-and-zip"), visual ("flash-and-zip"), or even olfactory ("sniff-and-zip") cortical perturbations in place of electromagnetic perturbations ("zap-and-zip") might be used to address this question. First, we discuss recent studies of perinatal cognition and consciousness using techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and, in particular, magnetoencephalography (MEG). While newborn infants are the archetypal subjects for studying early human development, researchers may also benefit from fetal studies, as the womb is, in many respects, a more controlled environment than the cradle. The earliest possible timepoint when subjective experience might begin is likely the establishment of thalamocortical connectivity at 26 weeks gestation, as the thalamocortical system is necessary for consciousness according to most theoretical frameworks. To infer at what age and in which behavioral states consciousness might emerge following the initiation of thalamocortical pathways, we advocate for the development of the sPCI and similar techniques, based on EEG, MEG, and fMRI, to estimate the perinatal brain's state of consciousness.
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Publication type
Article: Journal article
Document type
Review
Keywords
Consciousness ; Fetus ; Infant ; Meg ; Perinatal ; Perturbational Complexity; Event-related Potentials; Lempel-ziv Complexity; Brain Activity; Default Mode; Functional Connectivity; Permutation Entropy; Global Workspace; Infant Fmri; Follow-up; In-utero
ISSN (print) / ISBN
1053-8119
e-ISSN
1095-9572
Quellenangaben
Volume: 273,
Article Number: 120057
Publisher
Elsevier
Publishing Place
525 B St, Ste 1900, San Diego, Ca 92101-4495 Usa
Non-patent literature
Publications
Reviewing status
Peer reviewed
Grants
Tiny Blue Dot Foundation
Open Access Publishing Fund of the University of Tubingen
Brain, Mind and Consciousness program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR)
Australian Research Council (ARC)
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG , German Research Foundation)
German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)
European Union
FET Open Luminous project
Open Access Publishing Fund of the University of Tubingen
Brain, Mind and Consciousness program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR)
Australian Research Council (ARC)
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG , German Research Foundation)
German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)
European Union
FET Open Luminous project