While ubiquitous, pharmacological manipulation of consciousness remains poorly defined and incompletely understood ([Prys-Roberts, 1987][1]). This retards anesthetic drug development, confounds interpretation of animal studies conducted under anesthesia, and limits the sensitivity of clinical monitors of cerebral function to intact perception. Animal and human studies propose a functional “switch” at the level of the thalamus, with inhibition of thalamo-cortical transmission characterizing loss of consciousness ([Alkire et al., 2000][2]; [Mashour, 2006][3]). We investigated the effects of propofol, widely used for anesthesia and sedation, on spontaneous and evoked cerebral activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). A series of auditory and noxious stimuli was presented to eight healthy volunteers at three behavioral states: awake, “sedated” and “unresponsive.” Performance in a verbal task and the absence of a response to verbal stimulation, rather than propofol concentrations, were used t...

Background: One of the biggest challenges in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) research has been parsing brain activation (BOLD signal) from artifact noise. Multi-echo (ME) acquisition of fMRI data facilitates BOLD separation by capturing eve...

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) evidence has implicated cortical and subcortical circuits in risky choice, but whether activity in one or more circuits predict risky choice remains unclear. We convergently analyzed original data using a tem...

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been widely used to investigate the organization of intrinsic neural networks and its correlation with neurological disorders. Here, we investigated the association between a hearing disorde...

Simultaneous electroencephalography (EEG) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data provide a unique opportunity to measure brain spatio-temporal neural activity at a high temporal and spatial resolution [1-3]. However, EEG recorded simultan...

A consistent observation from numerous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies is that during voluntary movements, the functional activity of the basal ganglia nuclei and the primary motor cortex (M1) is reduced in individuals with Parkinso...

Studies on Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have been increasingly using resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rs-fMRI) to investigate alterations of functional connectivity. While findings have the potential to advance our knowledge about ...

Spontaneous brain activity is characterized by recurrent coupling and decoupling of local and remote neuronal substrates across different spatio-temporal scales. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) has been recently employed in ...

Blood oxygenation level dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging (BOLD fMRI) is an ideal non-invasive brain mapping technique. Acquisition and methods development make fMRI compelling to study cerebrovascular ageing, while acknowledging that non-...

Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) work in humans has demonstrated that neural activity associated with different visual stimulus categories (e.g., faces and houses) becomes less distinguishable with age. Furthermore, this decline in ...