Role of brain dimensionality in altered states of consciousness.

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We are entering an era of unprecedented interaction between different scientific disciplines to unravel the mysteries of the brain such as consciousness, which requires the collective behavior of many neurons organized in a highly sophisticated interactive architecture. Long -range dynamics are essential to describe how cortical areas interact and to extract brain dimensionality. This involves envisioning new metric spaces beyond the 3--dimensional physical space, and plays a fundamental role in understanding how space dimensionality shapes information flow. Numerical simulations and modeling of brain dynamics are reaching new levels of realism, and theories of consciousness are becoming more sophisticated. My long -term Discovery program objective is to maintain my leading role in brain dynamics research through the development of more realistic models of spontaneous and stimulated brain activity during wakefulness and in different states of altered consciousness such as sleep. My short- term objectives for the next five years are: 1) to develop a more realistic Generalized Ising Model (GIM) to predict spontaneous brain activity from structural connectivity and metabolic or encephalography activity in wakefulness and altered states of consciousness such as sleep. 2) To characterize stimulated activity using engaging naturalistic auditory input in wakefulness and in altered states of consciousness. I will modify the developed GIM to predict spontaneous activity by adding an external magnetic field with a profile extracted by the audio clip to model the effect of stimulation. 3) To determine the critical behavior of the GIM with and without an external magnetic field in wakefulness and altered states of consciousness. I will calculate dimensionality of the system for each level of consciousness and its role investigated to understand information flow in awake and under sleep. Finally I will calculate integrated information and causal density for the developed GIMs with and without an external magnetic field to characterize the different levels of consciousness. The dependence of causal interaction on the system's dimensionality will be investigated. New strategies will be developed to investigate the role of neural correlates of consciousness in the evolution of the brain. I have many international collaborations in place and expect to participate actively in the neuroscience community to contribute new insights into modeling the long -range dynamics of the brain and to the understanding of the mechanisms that support consciousness.