Pulin Gong
School of Psychology, University of Sydney
Biological naturalist Consciousness requires living metabolic hardware
Pulin Gong leads the Brain Dynamics Group at the University of Sydney, and his 2023 Nature Human Behaviour study with Yiben Xu, Xian Long and Jianfeng Feng found spiral-like rotational waves, which the authors call brain spirals, widespread in human cortical fMRI at rest and during tasks (the site’s analysis). Each spiral rotates around a phase singularity, and the properties of the spirals, their rotation directions and locations, are task relevant and classify cognitive tasks. The group also showed that multiple interacting spirals coordinate the correlated activations and de-activations of distributed functional regions, enabling flexible reconfiguration of task-driven activity flow between bottom-up and top-down directions.
The detection survives the methodological scrutiny the wave literature demands, since the paper reports the spirals in unfiltered fMRI signals, ruling out narrowband filtering artifacts. The data are fMRI BOLD signals sampled at a scale of seconds, not electrical recordings, and the group’s account stays at that scale. The group releases its analysis tooling as the BrainVortexToolbox, and the same geometry appears at faster scales in electrical recordings, where Huang and colleagues reported spiral wave dynamics in neocortex in 2010. For the question this site tracks, the result contributes a measured organizational layer, rotating waves rather than static networks, in the largest-scale dynamics a human cortex runs.
Known for. Spiral waves in human cortex from fMRI (Xu, Long, Feng and Gong, Nature Human Behaviour 2023), the BrainVortexToolbox, and spiral wave dynamics in cortical recordings
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Pulin Gong 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.