On April 4, Zhang Mingsha's team from the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, and IDG/ McGovern Institute for Brain Research collaborated with Zhao Hulin's team from Department of Neurosurgery, Chinese PLA General Hospital, and Li Xiaoli's team from Beijing Normal University published a research paper titled "Human high-order thalamic nuclei gate conscious perception through the thalamofrontal loop" in Science.

The paper was reported in the news section of Nature. In the report, Christopher Whyte, a systems neuroscientist at the University of Sydney in Australia , said that this is the first time that such simultaneous recordings have been made in people doing a task that is relevant to consciousness science.The work "is really pretty remarkable", he says, because it allowed the team to look at how the timing of neural activity in different regions varied. Liad Mudrik, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University in Israel, said that the latest study is “one of the most elaborate and extensive investigations of the role of the thalamus in consciousness”.

The paper was reported in the news section of Nature (Click to view)

The abstract of the paper is as follows:

Human high-order thalamic nuclei activity is known to closely correlate with conscious states. However, it is not clear how those thalamic nuclei and thalamocortical interactions directly contribute to the transient process of human conscious perception. We simultaneously recorded stereoelectroencephalography data from the thalamic nuclei and prefrontal cortex (PFC), while patients with implanted electrodes performed a visual consciousness task. Compared with the ventral nuclei and PFC, the intralaminar and medial nuclei presented earlier and stronger consciousness-related activity. Transient thalamofrontal neural synchrony and cross-frequency coupling were both driven by the θ phase of the intralaminar and medial nuclei during conscious perception. The intralaminar and medial thalamic nuclei thus play a gate role to drive the activity of the PFC during the emergence of conscious perception.

Full text link: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adr3675

Previous related work of the research group:

[1] Fang, Z., et al. (2024). "The involvement of the human prefrontal cortex in the emergence of visual awareness." eLife 12: RP89076.

[2] Fang, Z., et al. (2024). "Intracranial neural representation of phenomenal and access consciousness in the human brain." NeuroImage 297: 120699.