Gal Vishne
Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Biological naturalist Consciousness requires living metabolic hardware
Gal Vishne is the first author of the Cell Reports 2023 study that introduced the multiduration paradigm to consciousness science, decoding images across presentation durations of 300 to 1500 milliseconds from intracranial recordings in ten patients (the site’s analysis). The design isolates what neural activity tracks the ongoing presence of a percept from what fires when a stimulus starts, and the results split by region. Occipital and ventral temporal cortex held stable decodable content for the full duration, and the prefrontal cortex carried an onset burst that did not persist.
Her contribution includes the paper’s central proposal, the experience subspace, an embedded subspace of population responses that maintains the distinctions between categories and exemplars while the rest of the response varies. The projection onto that subspace is her candidate for what makes a percept’s quality stable across repetitions despite neuronal repetition suppression. The work feeds directly into the COGITATE adversarial collaboration, where the multiduration paradigm became a registered test of Integrated Information Theory and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory predictions, with both theories’ predictions fitting the sustained and transient halves of the result.
Known for. First author of the sustained versus transient representational dynamics study (Vishne, Gerber, Knight and Deouell, Cell Reports 2023) and the experience subspace proposal
Coverage on this site
Related researchers
- Leon Y. DeouellEdmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences and Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University of JerusalemCo-leader of the COGITATE adversarial collaboration paradigm, and senior author of the sustained versus transient content study (Vishne, Gerber, Knight and Deouell, Cell Reports 2023)
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Gal Vishne is listed with the other biological naturalists, who hold that consciousness requires living metabolic hardware. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.