Biology subjects

Blackburne, G.

Publications and source records attributed to Blackburne, G..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

What is it like to be a blob? A distributed, decentred and context-sensitive neurobiology of consciousness

Consciousness is often studied by asking whether particular brain regions or systems are privileged. We tested a distributed, decentred and context-sensitive alternative using 579 consciousness-focused neuroimaging studies. Semantic clustering of titles and abstracts identified seven domains whose corrected meta-analytic maps showed limited overlap and no invariant cross-domain core. These maps occupied 18.0% of grey matter while extending across 91.0% of brain regions. After controlling for reporting topography, distributed cognitive, sensorimotor and organismic-affective maps reconstructed the residual consciousness landscape better than spatial surrogates. Organismic-affective maps contributed most, but functional contributions varied contextually across domains. Theory-associated regional loci added no additional meaningful prediction. Information carried by the functional families was both redundant and synergistic. Coactivation-network and hypergraph analyses revealed a shared network repertoire but context-dependent higher-order coalitions. These results argue against an invariant core, supporting a distributed neurobiology of consciousness in which specialised systems are weighted and combined differently across contexts.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Speech markers of psychedelic-induced psychological change

5-MeO-DMT, a potent, short-acting psychedelic, induces profound shifts in cognition, affect, and self-awareness. Because language explicitly expresses these domains and voice implicitly conveys them, both may serve as potential biomarkers of behavioural change. This study introduces a novel framework for analysing baseline language and vocal features, pre- to post-psychedelic changes, assessing their potential to predict subjective experiences and psychological outcomes. Daily voice journals from 29 participants were collected via RetreatBot for two weeks before and after 5-MeO-DMT (1x12 mg). Transcripts were analysed using NLP (bag-of-words for vocabulary; transformer model for textual affect), and acoustic features (e.g., pitch, jitter, shimmer) were extracted to assess vocal dynamics. Following 5-MeO-DMT, speech markers revealed increased cognitive language, decreased social words, and altered voice quality (increased jitter/shimmer). Baseline speech patterns predicted psychological preparedness, ego dissolution anxiety, emotional breakthrough, and post-experience well-being. This first longitudinal analysis of speech markers following psychedelic use demonstrates a shift from external focus to introspection. Speech markers predicted and tracked psychological transformation, establishing vocal journaling as a valuable framework for monitoring psychedelic-induced changes and facilitating integration.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Complex slow waves radically reorganise human brain dynamics under 5-MeO-DMT

5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) is a psychedelic drug known for its uniquely profound effects on subjective experience, reliably eradicating the perception of time, space, and the self. However, little is known about how this drug alters large-scale brain activity. We collected naturalistic electroencephalography (EEG) data of 29 healthy individuals before and after inhaling a high dose (12mg) of vaporised synthetic 5-MeO-DMT. We replicate work from rodents showing amplified low-frequency oscillations, but extend these findings with novel tools for characterising the organisation and dynamics of complex low-frequency spatiotemporal fields of neural activity. We find that 5-MeO-DMT radically reorganises low-frequency flows of neural activity, causing them to become incoherent, heterogeneous, viscous, fleeting, nonrecurring, and to cease their typical travelling forwards and backwards across the cortex compared to resting state. Further, we find a consequence of this reorganisation in broadband activity, which exhibits slower, more stable, low-dimensional behaviour, with increased energy barriers to rapid global shifts. These findings provide the first detailed empirical account of how 5-MeO-DMT sculpts human brain dynamics, revealing a novel set of cortical slow wave behaviours, with significant implications for extant neuroscientific models of serotonergic psychedelics.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Where the present gets remembered: Sensory regions communicate with the brain over the longest timescales.

In natural contexts, the brain simultaneously processes sensory information over diverse timescales. Here we reveal how this is reflected in the organisation of asynchronous connectivity in the brain. In 86 individuals watching feature-length movies during functional neuroimaging, we calculated the delay at peak connectivity between brain regions. We found the longest delays in received whole-brain functional connectivity within sensory regions (:S 18 seconds). Two complementary dimensionality reduction approaches were used to probe the spatial organisation of connection delays and weights. First, clustering of received delays separated sensory, and transmodal/associative outputting regions, suggesting that putatively localised functions are associated with asynchronous local-to-whole-brain connectivity patterns. Next, we organised delayed connectivity maps by likeness, unveiling five orthogonal gradients of variation, each demonstrating associations between early-sensory and transmodal/associative regions. Together, these findings challenge contemporary conceptualisations of the brains temporal hierarchy by emphasising the role of sensory regions as sites of integration across timescales.

neuroscience↗