Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience | New and Recent Articles

Consciousness remains incompletely explained at the anatomical, biophysical, and functional levels. Although existing theories characterize key functional correlates of conscious experience—including global broadcasting, information integration, attentional selection, working-memory-based awareness, and electromagnetic field dynamics—none has yet identified a specific cellular mechanism embedded …

The increase in mental health disorders in college populations necessitates novel assessment strategies that circumvent the limitations of existing self-report instruments. To address this issue, this paper presents a new deep learning framework for mental health monitoring in academia by integrating multimodal passive sensing data collected from smartphones. A cross-modal attention network, sear…

IntroductionRespiration is increasingly recognized as a key modulator of brain-body interactions, influencing both neural and autonomic dynamics. While prior work has demonstrated respiratory-driven entrainment, it remains unclear whether distinct phases of the breathing cycle give rise to different dynamical regimes of cortical activity.MethodsIn this study, we investigated respiratory-phase-dep…

ObjectiveTo systematically evaluate the effects of exercise interventions on brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in patients with stroke, and to examine the dose–response relationships associated with acute and long-term exercise.MethodsPubMed, Embase, Web of Science, the Cochrane Library, and APA PsycINFO were searched for studies of exercise interventions in patients with stroke that repor…

This paper gives a roadmap for filling in a new integrated worldview, from physics to emergent phenomena, presented at Werbos (2010). That worldview starts from the assumption that the cosmos we live in is a dynamical system, which obeys what I call Hard Core Einsteinian realism (HCER), which can be approximated very well in our level of life by quantum electrodynamics as formulated by Everett, W…

Muscle synergies are traditionally viewed as stable, low-dimensional neuromuscular modules reflecting neural constraints. However, growing evidence suggests this mechanistic interpretation is incomplete. We propose a conceptual extension of the framework, arguing that coordination patterns reflected into multichannel EMG are emergent properties of an integrated cognitive–motor system rather than …

IntroductionChronic neuroinflammation is a hallmark of neurodegenerative diseases (Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease) and neuropsychiatric disorders (major depression, schizophrenia). However, current models fail to explain why some individuals develop persistent neuroinflammation while others maintain homeostasis, nor why similar inflammatory pathology produces such diverse clinical pheno…

In the hippocampus, slow waves are accompanied by brief population bursts of high-frequency oscillations (150–250 Hz) known as Sharp-Wave Ripples (SWRs), a phenomenon associated with memory consolidation during offline brain states and Non-Rapid Eye Movement (NREM) sleep. Despite the relevance of SWRs, no standardized criterion for their automatic detection has been established. This work introdu…

The stress response is a non-specific adaptive physiological reaction that occurs when the organism is exposed to internal or external environmental stimuli, serving to maintain homeostatic balance. Its regulation involves highly complex neural mechanisms. The hippocampus, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), and the paraventricular hypothalamic nucleus (PVN) are key brain regions that…

Emotional memories are essential for survival, enabling individuals to avoid future threats or seek safety or food. How does the brain link a specific spatiotemporal context with the associated emotional experience? The hippocampus (HPC) encodes spatial information through place cells, which collectively form a cognitive map that adapts to contextual changes. Along its longitudinal axis, the HPC …

Ketamine responses vary across patients and sessions, suggesting that dose alone is an incomplete organizing principle. We propose a state-first Gate-Amplifier-Reintegration framework in which awake low-dose ketamine acts primarily as an Amplifier of transient network flexibility, whereas autonomic-salience stability is treated as a candidate Gate that may shape whether this flexibility remains s…

Systems neuroscience—from Lashley's distributed engrams through Pribram's field-based processing to Freeman's oscillatory dynamics—has long argued that intelligence is a whole-brain property requiring feedback-driven computation. We formalize this tradition using Reinforcement Learning and Approximate Dynamic Programming (RLADP) and propose that vertebrate intelligence falls into four qualitative…

Emotion-related states encompass a wide range of affective and behavioral dimensions, including anxiety, fear, pleasure, and aversion, whereas motivation refers to internal drives that energize goal-directed behaviors such as feeding, reward seeking, or avoidance. These states are thought to arise from the brain’s integration of exteroceptive inputs, interoceptive signals reflecting bodily states…

BackgroundThis paper addresses a critical challenge in developing practical EEG-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs): enhancing cross-subject generalization by mitigating individual differences in brain signals. How can we effectively leverage data from existing subjects to improve performance for a new user with minimal subject-specific calibration?MethodsWe systematically compare and optimize…

IntroductionVolatile anesthetics, such as isoflurane, generate a state of unconsciousness and analgesia across the animal kingdom and are widely used in clinical settings. Yet, anesthetic mechanisms are poorly understood: the volatile anesthetics are so profligate in their potential effects that it has proven difficult to determine which actions are most causal at the systems level.MethodsTo test…

ObjectiveThe aim of this study is to investigate whether treadmill exercise alleviates motor dysfunction in a mouse model of Parkinson’s disease (PD) by modulating the excitability of striatal medium spiny neurons expressing dopamine type 2 receptors (D2-MSNs).MethodsA unilateral 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA) injection was performed in the right striatum of D2-Cre mice to establish a hemi-lesioned P…

ObjectivesThe interplay between emotion and memory is a central topic in cognitive neuroscience, with open questions about the underlying neuronal mechanisms. This article aims to study the effects of order and intensity of emotional information on associative memory encoding. To this aim, we employ dynamic causal modeling to model the dynamic network composed of the hippocampus, amygdala, and or…