{
  "id": 2205066,
  "title": "Neural Signatures of Conscious Experience During Sleep: A Serial Awakening Study Using High-Density EEG",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/20/neural-signatures-of-conscious-experience-during-sleep-a-serial",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-08-20T00:00:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "bioRxiv",
    "slug": "biorxiv",
    "url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.16.745040v1?rss=1"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Unraveling the neural signatures of consciousness during sleep has long been a perplexing question in neuroscience. Sleep provides an ideal setting to examine brain activity when experiencing or not experiencing subjective awareness while avoiding behavioral response complications. By employing 256 electrode high-density EEG on 140 participants and implementing a serial-awakening method, researchers examined 699 non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep stage 2 and 3 awakenings, categorizing them into 351 instances of dreaming experiences and 348 periods without dreams.\n\nKey features observed in the 60 seconds leading up to each awakening consisted of regional spectral power, lagged-coherence connectivity, graph-theoretic metrics, and gamma-to-alpha power ratios. Participants experiencing dreams displayed shifts in posterior spectral balance, featuring decreased alpha and delta power and heightened gamma-related indicators, alongside altered large-scale network organization compared to those who did not experience dreams.\n\nUsing cross-validated machine-learning analyses on a participant-level basis, all classifiers outperformed random chance, with the most effective ensemble model achieving an ROC-AUC of 0.80 and an average precision of 0.80. The findings illuminate reproducible posterior electrophysiological and network-level markers of conscious states during NREM sleep, offering valuable insights into the neural underpinnings of consciousness.",
  "summary": "Identifying neural signatures of consciousness remains a central challenge in neuroscience. Sleep offers a tractable model for comparing brain activity in the presence or absence of subjective experience while minimizing behavioral responsiveness confounds. Using overnight 256 electrode high-density EEG in 140 participants and a serial-awakening paradigm, we analyzed 699 non-rapid eye movement…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}