The Center for Consciousness Science (CCS) conducts studies across the translational spectrum, from computational brain models, to experiments in animals, to studies of healthy humans, to clinical trials in patients.  

We employ multimodal neuroimaging in our human protocols as well as neurophysiology and neurochemistry in our laboratories.  

Furthermore, our basic science research program includes neural circuit manipulation through pharmacological, electrical stimulation, chemogenetic, and optogenetic techniques. The CCS has deep expertise in analyses involving graph theory, advanced functional connectivity measure, and neural dynamics.  

We are fortunate to have robust support from the National Institutes of Health and have had major grants from the James S. McDonnell Foundation. 

Active research areas within CCS include:

  • Neural networks controlling sleep, anesthesia, cognition, and pain
  • Anesthetic modulation of intracortical neuronal communication and information integration
  • Large-scale neural substrates of human consciousness affected by pharmacologic, neuropathologic, and cognitive disorders
  • Computational models of emergence and control of consciousness in large-scale brain networks during anesthesia and chronic pain
  • Electrophysiology of brain dynamics in anesthesia, sleep, psychedelic states, and in the developing and aging brain
  • Global neuronal workspace theory and the role of the prefrontal cortex in the level and content of consciousness and in psychedelic states
  • Brain circuits that regulate arousal states of sleep and wakefulness, postoperative sleep disturbances and memory
  • Neuronal mechanisms of memory encoding, storage, and transfer for conscious declarative experience
  • Physiological basis of near-death experience in cardiac arrest survivors

Further details can be found under each investigator’s page.

Recent Publications