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Disorders of consciousness are characterized by severe impairments in arousal and awareness. Deep brain stimulation is a potential treatment, but outcomes vary-possibly due to differences in patient characteristics, electrode placement, or the specific brain network engaged. We describe 40 patients with disorders of consciousness undergoing deep brain stimulation targeting the thalamic centromedian-parafascicular complex. Improvements in consciousness are associated with better-preserved gray matter, particularly in the striatum. Electric field modeling reveals that stimulation is most effective when it extends below the centromedian nucleus, engaging the inferior parafascicular nucleus and the adjacent ventral tegmental tract-a pathway that connects the brainstem and hypothalamus and runs along the midbrain-thalamus border. External validation analyzed show that effective stimulation engages a brain network overlapping with disrupted patterns of brain activity observed in two independent cohorts with impaired consciousness: one with arousal-impairing stroke lesions and the other with awareness-impairing seizures. Together, these findings advance the field by informing patient selection, refining stimulation targets, and identifying a brain network linked to recovery that may have broader therapeutic relevance across consciousness-impairing conditions.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-61988-4 | DOI Listing |
Neurotrauma Rep
August 2025
Department of Radiology, Weill Cornell Medicine; New York, New York, USA.
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) impairs attention and executive function, often through disrupted coordination between cognitive and autonomic systems. While electroencephalography (EEG) and pupillometry are widely used to assess neural and autonomic responses independently, little is known about how these systems interact in TBI. Understanding their coordination is essential to identify compensatory mechanisms that may support attention under conditions of neural inefficiency.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Hum Neurosci
August 2025
Baptist Medical Center, Department of Behavioral Health, Jacksonville, FL, United States.
Introduction: This study investigates four subdomains of executive functioning-initiation, cognitive inhibition, mental shifting, and working memory-using task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data and graph analysis.
Methods: We used healthy adults' functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data to construct brain connectomes and network graphs for each task and analyzed global and node-level graph metrics.
Results: The bilateral precuneus and right medial prefrontal cortex emerged as pivotal hubs and influencers, emphasizing their crucial regulatory role in all four subdomains of executive function.
Front Comput Neurosci
August 2025
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, United States.
Artificial neural networks are limited in the number of patterns that they can store and accurately recall, with capacity constraints arising from factors such as network size, architectural structure, pattern sparsity, and pattern dissimilarity. Exceeding these limits leads to recall errors, eventually leading to catastrophic forgetting, which is a major challenge in continual learning. In this study, we characterize the theoretical maximum memory capacity of single-layer feedforward networks as a function of these parameters.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Sports Act Living
August 2025
Faculty of Physical Education, China West Normal University, Nanchong, China.
Understanding how athletes mentally simulate and anticipate actions provides key insights into experience-driven brain plasticity. While previous studies have investigated motor imagery and action anticipation separately, little is known about how their underlying neural mechanisms converge or diverge in expert performers. This study conducted a meta-analysis using activation likelihood estimation (ALE) and meta-analytic connectivity modeling (MACM) to compare brain activation patterns between athletes and non-athletes across both tasks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBrain Commun
August 2025
Geoffrey Jefferson Brain Research Centre, Manchester Academic Health Science Centre, Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust, University of Manchester, Manchester M6 8FJ, UK.
The cortex of the brain is covered by three meningeal layers: the dura, the arachnoid, and the pia mater. Substantial discoveries have been made demonstrating the structural and functional relationships between these layers, and with other neighbouring structures such as the skull. Importantly, improved understanding of the meningeal lymphatic network places the meninges at the nexus of a cross talk between the brain, peripheral immune system, and the skull bone marrow.
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