People

I am Wellcome Trust Biomedical Research Fellow Since 2011. This is a 5-year scheme for young researchers to establish their own lines of research. After four years of postdoctoral studies, one in Paris and three here at the CBU I am now an Independent Researcher mainly linked to the Executive Processes Group.

I have wide Interests in Cognition and neurophysiology. In the last few years I have been mainly concentrating in describing different states of consciousness such as awake, sleep, sedation, vegetative state. My new line of work is primarily looking at how we lose consciousness and how we get it back.

I am mainly attacking the limits of cognition in the process of falling asleep or getting sedated (losing consciousness) with a combination of behavioural measures, brain markers of cognitive processes and brain markers of the micro-conscious state. Together with my students and collaborators we use behaviour measures, electromyography, electroencephalography, functional MRI, intracranial electrodes and transcranial magnetic stimulation, to respond the main questions at the intersection between awareness and wakefulness.

A full CV, publications and miscellanea are here.

Selected Publications

Our first paper with intracranial recordings (from Argentina)

Ibáñez, Cardona, Vidal Dos Santos, Blenkmann, Aravena, Roca, Hurtado, Nerguizian, Amoruso, Gómez-Arévalo, Chade, Dubrovsky, Gershanik, Kochen, Glenberg, Manes and Bekinschtein (2012). Motor-Language Coupling: Direct Evidence from Early Parkinson's Disease and intracranial cortical recordings. Cortex, (in press).

A short review defining some ideas at the crossroads between wakefulness, attention and awareness

Chennu and Bekinschtein (2012). Arousal modulates auditory attention and awareness: insights from sleep, sedation and disorders of consciousness. Frontiers in Psychology.

Our take on the relationship between conditioning and consciousness.

Bekinschtein, Peeters, Shalom and Sigman (2011). Sea slugs, subliminal pictures and vegetative state patients: Boundaries of consciousness in classical conditioning. Front. Psychology.

A review summarising cognition while falling asleep

Goupil and Bekinschtein (2012). Cognitive processing during the transition to Sleep. Archives Italiennes de Biologie.

A key paper detecting consciousness with EEG in unconscious patients

Cruse, Chennu, Chatelle, Bekinschtein, Fernandez-Espejo, Pickard, Laureys and Owen. (2011) Bedside detection of awareness in the vegetative state. Lancet.

Our first paper on mechanisms of mirth (more to come)

Bekinschtein, Davis, Coleman, Rodd and Owen (2011).Why Clowns taste funny? A study on how we process jokes through semantic ambiguity. Journal of Neuroscience

Unconscious patients activate the motor cortex to command

Bekinschtein, Manes, Villarreal, Owen and DellaMaggiore. (2011) fMRI reveals movement preparatory brain activity in presumably unconscious vegetative state patients. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

Learning in unconscious patients

Bekinschtein, Shalom, Forcato, Herrera, Manes and Sigman (2009). Classical conditioning in the vegetative and minimally conscious state. Nature Neuroscience.

Memory strategies in the real world

Bekinschtein, Cardozo, Manes (2009). Strategies of Buenos Aires Waiters to Enhance Memory Capacity in a Real-life Setting. Behavioral Neurology

Neural markers of auditory consciousness

Bekinschtein, Dehaene, Rohaut, Tadel, Cohen, Naccache (2009) Neural signature of the conscious processing of auditory regularities. PNAS.