Inter-individual diversity in brain function and conscious experience

Humans experience the world in different ways – with each of us having an idiosyncratic, subjective viewpoint.  How this inter-individual variation in subjective experience is related to diversity in brain function is poorly understood. In my talk, I will focus on brain-fingerprints, a set of functional neuroimaging features that reliably distinguish individuals from one another.  I will describe work from my PhD studies at McGill University on brain-fingerprinting and explore how these approaches may inform new research on inter-individual differences in conscious experiences. Individuals can be robustly differentiated from one another using brief neurophysiological recordings from the spatial distribution of fast neurophysiological dynamics. These brain-fingerprints can differentiate individuals with recordings performed weeks apart and relate to cognitive abilities like attention. Idiosyncratic neurophysiological profiles are driven, in part, by genetics: The brain-fingerprints of monozygotic twins are significantly more similar than dizygotic twin pairs. Genes related to neurotransmission predominantly influence unique neurophysiological profiles, and the impact of these genetic determinants on psychological traits increases across neurodevelopment. In the second half of my talk, I will describe ongoing work from my postdoc at UCL where I am developing computational accounts of inter-individual differences in subjective experiences. Recent work suggests that participants simplify their perceptual representations of the environment to aid planning. I investigated how individual variation in selective attention constrains this process of perceptual simplification. Inspired by the analogy of the ‘spotlight of attention’, we modelled the critical role of visuospatial attention in constructing task representations. Our ongoing project bridges computational models of task representation and selective attention to better understand idiosyncrasies in how participants represent their environments in aid of planning.