Leon Y. Deouell
Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences and Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Biological naturalist Consciousness requires living metabolic hardware
Leon Y. Deouell is a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a co-organizer of the COGITATE adversarial collaboration, the program that registered predictions from Integrated Information Theory and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory and tested both (the site’s coverage). His 2023 Cell Reports study with first author Gal Vishne introduced the multiduration paradigm, presenting images for 300, 900 or 1500 milliseconds to separate onset responses from signals tracking ongoing presence (the site’s analysis). The finding split cleanly. Sensory cortex held a stable representation of the content for the full presentation, and the prefrontal cortex fired a transient onset burst without report and did not sustain it.
The registered predictions of both theories fit this split, which is why the paradigm became one of COGITATE’s two key tests. The paper’s own framing connects the anatomy and the temporal structure of experience, sustained content in sensory regions and discrete updating in frontoparietal regions, and proposes the experience subspace, a stable subspace of population responses that maintains category and exemplar distinctions despite moment-to-moment variability. Deouell’s program treats the where and the when of consciousness as one question, and the multiduration design is the measurement that joins them.
Known for. Co-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)
Coverage on this site
Related researchers
- Gal VishneEdmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, The Hebrew University of JerusalemFirst author of the sustained versus transient representational dynamics study (Vishne, Gerber, Knight and Deouell, Cell Reports 2023) and the experience subspace proposal
- František BaluškaUniversity of BonnCellular consciousness, subcellular nanobrains, plant neurobiology, sentient cells as units of physiology
- Tristan A. BekinschteinDepartment of Psychology / Consciousness and Cognition Lab, University of CambridgeClinical biomarkers of consciousness, local-global auditory paradigm, transitions from wakefulness to sedation, neural dynamics of awareness
- Tomas Berjaga-BuisanComputational Neuroscience Group, Center for Brain and Cognition, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, BarcelonaNon-equilibrium thermodynamics of whole-brain models, fluctuation-dissipation theorem violations as a non-invasive consciousness marker
- Douglas BlackistonAllen Discovery Center at Tufts UniversityMemory stability during brain remodeling, xenobot platform design, amphibian memory transplantation work
- Scott L. BrincatPicower Institute for Learning and Memory, MITElectrophysiology of primate prefrontal cortex, traveling oscillatory waves, and Analog Cognition and Consciousness (2026)
Leon Y. Deouell 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.