Conscious Brain States Occupy a Narrow Dynamical Balance Between Rigidity and Chaos

THIS AND ALL PREVIOUS VERSIONS OF DEPOSIT ARE STILL A WORK IN PROGRESS, PLEASE DO NOT USE IT This deposit contains the complete manuscript and analysis code for a study demonstrating that consciousness occupies a narrow dynamical corridor between two opposite failure modes: rigidity (deep sleep, propofol) and chaos (ketamine). Analysis of EEG data across sleep states (20 subjects, 1,515 epochs), ketamine (390 epochs), and propofol anesthesia (43 patients) reveals that temporal horizon—the timescale maintaining phase coherence—universally orders all consciousness states (p = 1.2×10⁻⁸). Critically, this ordering emerges from phase dynamics (timing) rather than amplitude (energy), establishing consciousness as temporal coordination phenomenon. Key findings:• Bi-directional failure: consciousness eliminated by opposite mechanisms• Phase-amplitude dissociation: timing matters, energy doesn't (p = 6.58×10⁻⁸)• Baseline geometry predicts individual anesthetic response (p = 0.017)• Scale-invariant dynamics across 10-200ms timescales• Clinical applications for personalized anesthesia monitoring Contents:1. Complete manuscript with figures (PDF)2. Jupyter notebook: Initial validation tests3. Jupyter notebook: Multi-architecture convergence validation4. README with reproduction instructions 5. Supplemental information with figures (PDF) 6. Jupyter notebook: Code for generating figures for main paper and supplemental information. All analyses use publicly available datasets:• Sleep-EDF Database (PhysioNet)• Farnes et al. ketamine dataset (Zenodo) Computational validation performed independently across 4 AI architectures (ChatGPT, Kimi k2, Gemini, DeepSeek), all converging on identical results. You can access both test notebooks directly from these two links shared below. They will open their respective gists from github in google collab. https://colab.research.google.com/gist/consciousframework/4d92c96e5df7386e123769798c104dc9/01_Initial_Consciousness_Tests.ipy https://colab.research.google.com/gist/consciousframework/11093f0c430a0adda76146c30a46ab31/02_Multi_Architecture_Validation.ipynb Also, you can access the complete python code to generate all figures for main paper and supplemental information by visiting below link. https://colab.research.google.com/gist/consciousframework/f3c5266c32601acbf6d4ec88d68731f6/03_figures_consciousness_corridor_paper.ipynb Status: Manuscript submitted to eLife for peer review.