Tristan Bekinschtein

Tristan Bekinschtein is an Anglo-Argentinean biologist, Master in Neurophysiology and PhD in neuroscience, Buenos Aires University.^[1] He is a university professor and Turing Fellow^[2] at Cambridge University. Bekinschtein is primarily known for his work on variable states of consciousness and auditory feedback. He presently runs the Consciousness and Cognition Laboratory at Cambridge University.^[3]

Bekinschtein began his scientific career as a neuroimaging analyst at the Raul Carrea Institute in 1999. In 2005, he joined the Impaired Consciousness Group^[4] at the University of Cambridge as a research fellow. He became an Assistant Researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Neurology in Argentina in 2006, before joining the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit (UNICOG) at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris. In 2008, he joined the MRC-Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University as a research fellow. In 2012, he gave a TED Talk on consciousness at Rio De La Plata.^[5]

As of 2011, Bekinschtein runs the Consciousness and Cognition Laboratory at Cambridge University.^[6]

Bekinschtein has more than 150 publications^[7] in renowned peer-reviewed publications. Below is a selection:

• "Neural signature of the conscious processing of auditory regularities" TA Bekinschtein, S Dehaene, B Rohaut, F Tadel, L Cohen, L Naccache. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (5), 1672–1677.^[8] This article is about how attention and consciousness modulates the detection of auditory information.
• "Classical conditioning in the vegetative and minimally conscious state" TA Bekinschtein, DE Shalom, C Forcato, M Herrera, MR Coleman. Nature Neuroscience 12 (10), 1343–1349.^[9] This article is about how simple learning capacity can detect consciousness in patients and its prognosis.
• "Brain connectivity dissociates responsiveness from drug exposure during propofol-induced transitions of consciousness" S Chennu, S O’Connor, R Adapa, DK Menon, TA Bekinschtein. PLoS Computational Biology 12 (1), e1004669.^[10] In this article, the authors used brain signals to predict the amount of drug in blood and if a person can respond or has lost consciousness.
• "Inducing task-relevant responses to speech in the sleeping brain" S Kouider, T Andrillon, LS Barbosa, L Goupil, TA Bekinschtein. Current Biology 24 (18), 2208–2214.^[11] In this article, the authors showed that there are brain signatures of intention to act during sleep.
• "Losing the left side of the world: rightward shift in human spatial attention with sleep onset" CA Bareham, T Manly, OV Pustovaya, SK Scott, TA Bekinschtein. Scientific reports 4 (1), 1–5.^[12] In this article, the authors showed that normal people behave like patients with brain lesions when getting drowsy.
• "Preserved sensory processing but hampered conflict detection when stimulus input is task-irrelevant" SA Nuiten, A Canales-Johnson, L Beerendonk, N Nanuashvili,... . Elife 10, e64431.^[13] In this article, the authors showed the degree of involvement of attention and relevance of stimuli to resolve a conflict cognitive control task.
• "Decreasing alertness modulates perceptual decision-making" SR Jagannathan, CA Bareham, TA Bekinschtein. Journal of Neuroscience 42 (3), 454–473.^[14] This study shows possible mechanisms of brain reconfiguration of decision making triggered by waning wakefulness.
• "Decreased alertness reconfigures cognitive control networks" A Canales-Johnson, L Beerendonk, S Blain, S Kitaoka, ... . Journal of Neuroscience 40 (37), 7142–7154.^[15] This study shows that people can still resolve conflicts when drowsy but they use different brain networks.
• "Dissociable neural information dynamics of perceptual integration and differentiation during bistable perception" A Canales-Johnson, AJ Billig, F Olivares, A Gonzalez, MC Garcia, W Silva, ... . Cerebral Cortex 30 (8), 4563–4580.^[16] This study showed that different brain signatures for different ways of perceiving  the same sounds, it is the internal world that defines what we hear.
• "Different underlying mechanisms for high and low arousal in probabilistic learning in humans" LF Ciria, M Suárez-Pinilla, AG Williams, SR Jagannathan, D Sanabria, ... TA Bekinschtein. Cortex 143, 180–194.^[17] In this article the authors outline the relationship between arousal and cognitive flexibility that leads to the understanding of the underlying mechanisms of cognition when challenged by internal homeostatic changes.

• Laboratory page
• Cambridge University BCNI page
• Cambridge Neuroscience Profile page
• Turing Institute Profile page