Mapping the Structure of Neural States Associated with Conscious Experience

This repository contains a review and synthesis of empirical research on the neural states associated with conscious experience. Rather than focusing on isolated neural correlates or explanatory mechanisms, the work examines the structural organization of neural activity across multiple experimental paradigms. Drawing on findings from neural correlates of consciousness research, representational similarity analysis, neural manifold studies, perturbational approaches, and canonical sensory systems, the paper analyzes how neural activity is organized in state space during conscious and unconscious conditions. Across modalities and measurement techniques, conscious experience is associated with neural states that are restricted to admissible configurations, organized within low-dimensional state spaces, structured by meaningful geometric and topological relationships, and dynamically accessible under perturbation. The review highlights convergent structural features across sensory and cognitive domains, including metric organization reflecting experiential similarity, categorical clustering, constrained state transitions, and reduced accessibility during anesthesia, sleep, and disorders of consciousness. By synthesizing results across methods and contexts, the work delineates empirical constraints on the neural organization associated with conscious experience without advancing a specific theoretical model. This archive version is intended to provide a stable, citable reference for the structural analysis and synthesis presented in the paper.