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

Consciousness, a topic of intense study, has been traditionally explored by focusing on specific brain regions or systems that may be privileged. To challenge this conventional approach, a study examined consciousness through a different lens - one that is distributed, decentred, and context-sensitive. Researchers analyzed 579 consciousness-focused neuroimaging studies, using semantic clustering of titles and abstracts to identify seven domains.

The corrected meta-analytic maps revealed these domains had limited overlap and no invariant cross-domain core. Remarkably, these maps occupied 18.0% of grey matter and extended across 91.0% of brain regions.

After accounting for reporting topography, distributed cognitive, sensorimotor, and organismic-affective maps were found to reconstruct the residual consciousness landscape more effectively than spatial surrogates. The organismic-affective maps contributed the most, but the functional contributions varied contextually across domains.

Crucially, theory-associated regional loci added no additional meaningful prediction. Information carried by the functional families was found to be both redundant and synergistic. Coactivation-network and hypergraph analyses further revealed a shared network repertoire, but with context-dependent higher-order coalitions.

These findings argue against the existence of an invariant core for consciousness. Instead, they support a distributed neurobiology of consciousness where specialised systems are weighted and combined differently depending on the context.