AI Insight
This study proposes that conscious experience arises from self-organized criticality maintained by resonance between brain and body signals, challenging the conventional neuroscientific practice of removing physiological artifacts from EEG recordings. Using 64-channel EEG data, the authors show that standard preprocessing eliminates integrative neural dynamics by discarding physiological components, and identify a brain-body resonance at 78 milliseconds that produces zero-lag synchronization through bidirectional causality. Raw EEG data exhibits heavy-tailed avalanche distributions consistent with near-critical neural dynamics, while conventionally cleaned data rejects power-law behavior, suggesting artifact removal artificially pushes the system away from criticality.
Why it matters
If confirmed, these findings would require a fundamental reassessment of standard EEG preprocessing pipelines used across cognitive neuroscience and clinical research, potentially affecting how brain disorders involving disrupted consciousness are studied and understood.
arXiv:2605.00024v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The “binding problem” of how distributed neural activity unifies into conscious experience has remained an open challenge since its articulation in 1890. We present evidence that conscious integration relies on self-organized criticality maintained by brain-body resonance, placing human cognition within the universality class of critical systems. Using 64-channel EEG data, we demonstrate that conventional preprocessing inadvertently eliminates the very integrative dynamics it seeks to measure. Removing physiological signals conventionally treated as “artifacts” drastically reduces the shared variance between global phase synchronization and stimulus-evoked amplitude, an effect highly specific to physiological components. We trace this to a fundamental brain-body resonance at 78 milliseconds that establishes zero-lag synchronization driven by robust bidirectional causality. Crucially, raw data exhibits heavy-tailed avalanche dynamics indicative of a near-critical regime, whereas conventionally cleaned data definitively rejects power-law distributions, signaling an artificial shift to subcriticality. Finally, we show these critical dynamics enable holographic information encoding, evidenced by a significant emergence of spatial interference patterns post-resonance. Together, these findings indicate that physiological signals actively and selectively support the coupling between large-scale neural coordination and event-related processing.
Source: Self-organized criticality enables conscious integration through brain-body resonance