The starting intuition is that measures of #emergence shouldn’t just quantify how much emergence there is, but also reveal how the resulting emergent #dynamical #landscape is structured and organised. The real challenge? Figuring out how to do this across scales. 2/n
Enter: #Dynamical #Closure. What I was really after was how closed macroscopic scales are from their micro-level generators. And, how this closure might relate to neural dynamics underlying conscious states, and if it is modulated during unresponsiveness. 3/n
Simply: how do different anaesthetic agents reshape the #dynamical #landscape of neural activity across emergent, macroscopic scales? We finally had a way to measure it. So, why not be bold enough to test some of our deepest intuitions? 4/n
We applied DI to source-reconstructed EEG recorded while participants were awake and while consciousness was suppressed by propofol, xenon or ketamine. What we found was confronting, exciting, and completely reshaped how I think about emergence in the brain. 5/n
The results overturn an intuitive assumption that richer #consciousness should coincide with greater #emergence. Instead, we show that loss of consc. is characterised by higher emergence (meaning stronger cross-scale decoupling) yet the emergent landscape becomes fragmented 6/n
Getting into the nitty gritty, we found drug specific effects. First, propofol and xenon both *elevate* emergence while fragmenting the emergent landscape across the #multiscale #heterarchy. 7/n
Contrasting this with #wake, and to a lesser extent the #dream-like #ketamine anaesthetic state, which display *lower* overall emergence but a far more structured emergence landscape! It was crazy wild! But it took time to grasp the deeper insight behind it. 8/n
Our results flipped the script on the old intuition that more emergence means more consciousness. And just like that (light bulb moment 💡) 9/n
I realised that this paradox dissolves if we recognise that conscious experience depends on integration across spatiotemp. scales of brain activity. Here, the wakeful brain sits at a sweet-spot where macroscopic dynamics remain tightly interwoven with their micro-level 10/n
Anaesthetic-induced unresponsiveness, by contrast, breaks this vertical tether: macroscopic dynamics proliferate and become fragmented, producing an explosion of the number of closed macros discovered on each scale that never consolidate into structured and dominant dynamics 11/n
It gave us a #new #perspective on #neurophys #data and the relation to conscious states. Hopefully with some insight into how neural dynamics, across scales, relate to up-keeping wakeful states. And in turn, how a specific type of #fragmentation occurs under anaesthesia. 12/n