The neural correlates of shared and individual experience

TL;DR

The study explores how brain activity patterns differ when people have shared or individual experiences during a story, using brain scans.

Contribution

A new method is introduced to analyze individual-specific brain dynamics without assuming shared states across people.

Findings

Brain dynamics of the default mode network are more unique to individuals during conscious experience.

Auditory and attention networks show more shared brain activity when people are conscious.

Individual-specific brain dynamics are linked to higher complexity during conscious experience.

Abstract

We set out to explore the neural correlates of individual-specific experiences. We propose an approach through which we compute individual-specific dynamics of functional connectivity states. These dynamics do not require estimation of common states across individuals and can be directly related to dynamic behavioural ratings of subjective experience. To this end, we leverage a unique functional magnetic resonance imaging dataset where subjects listened to an engaging naturalistic story while awake and under different levels of anaesthesia, altering or abolishing conscious experience. We find that this method can detect correspondences between neural and subjective dynamics. We then show that the dynamics of the default mode network are more dissimilar between participants during awareness compared to unconsciousness and therefore may tend to underlie more personal experiences of the story. On the other hand, the auditory and posterior dorsal attention networks show higher inter-subject similarity in consciousness compared to unconsciousness and suggest that the dynamics of these networks support more “generalisable” experiences of the story. We further characterise individual-specific brain dynamics by showing that they are associated with higher complexity in consciousness, whilst conversely, brain dynamics underlying shared experience become less complex during the conscious experience of the story.

The authors find a correspondence between dynamic ratings of subjective experience and brain network dynamics during a naturalistic auditory story. They then explore which networks differentially support individual-specific and shared experiences.

Figures