Marzia De Lucia

Repeated sensory inputs allow the brain to form predictions about upcoming events, as evidenced by electroencephalographic responses to deviant or omitted sounds in regular auditory sequences. Beyond external inputs, the brain continuously monitors internally generated visceral signals such as the heartbeat, which also exhibit intrinsic regularity and are processed largely implicitly to maintain physiological stability.Here I propose that bodily rhythms facilitate the processing of auditory regularities across different levels of consciousness. Using electroencephalography, I show that the brain responds to unexpected sound omissions embedded within auditory sequences synchronized with the ongoing heartbeat (cardio-audio regularity) during both wakefulness and sleep. Remarkably, similar neural responses are observed in comatose patients, particularly in those with favorable outcomes. These findings are complemented by modulations of cardiac activity following omissions in cardio-audio sequences across vigilance states in healthy individuals and in comatose patients with good prognosis.

Marzia De Lucia, PhD is a neuroscientist at the Lausanne University Hospital and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. She studied Physics at the University of La Sapienza in Rome and was a research fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London. After obtaining her PhD in Physics in 2004 from the University La Sapienza, she was research fellow at the Medical Physics Department, University College London. In 2006, she joined the CIBM Center for Biomedical Imaging as research scientist in Lausanne, and in 2016, she was appointed senior scientist and lecturer at the University of Lausanne and the University Hospital.Since 2024,  Marzia De Lucia, PhD, is Head of the CIBM EEG CHUV-UNIL Computational Electrical Neuroimaging Section.