Unraveling how evidence accumulation determines conscious experience using voltammetry

ongoing

"Consciousness entails the phenomenal experience we have of the world and ourselves. Although it is at the heart of major philosophical, scientific and ethical issues, our understanding of the neural mechanisms of consciousness remains limited. The study of consciousness is compartmentalised, with researchers focusing on isolated sub-aspects of the problem, via restrictive paradigms that ignore the temporal dynamics of conscious experience, its metacognitive component, or its dependence on levels of consciousness. Moreover, we know virtually nothing about the single-neuron and neurochemical basis for consciousness in humans. VOLTA will advance beyond these empirical and theoretical limitations by conducting a multidimensional and multiscale study of consciousness. The project builds on a computational framework I recently developed linking consciousness to evidence accumulation. It will utilise the clinical context of pharmaco-resistant epilepsy to collect unprecedented behavioural and neural data. Individuals with epilepsy will participate in novel behavioural paradigms quantifying multiple dimensions of conscious experience, including its temporal dynamics, metacognitive components, and existence under sleep and anaesthesia. These experiments will be combined with triple neural recordings that simultaneously characterise #1 the global activity of neural populations, #2 spiking activity of individual neurons, and #3 electrochemical activity by measuring neuromodulator release with voltammetry. These unprecedented recordings will provide a multiscale map of the neurobiological basis of consciousness. My team and I, assisted by international experts, will interpret this rich dataset in light of seven preregistered hypotheses derived from my computational framework. In summary, VOLTA will carry out a first-of-a-kind within-subject study to reveal the electrophysiological and electrochemical mechanisms of the multiple dimensions of consciousness. "