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Category: Consciousness

Is consciousness everywhere?

Is consciousness everywhere?

Christof Koch writes: What is common between the delectable taste of a favorite food, the sharp sting of an infected tooth, the fullness after a heavy meal, the slow passage of time while waiting, the willing of a deliberate act, and the mixture of vitality, tinged with anxiety, just before a competitive event? All are distinct experiences. What cuts across each is that all are subjective states, and all are consciously felt. Accounting for the nature of consciousness appears elusive,…

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The link between bioelectricity and consciousness

The link between bioelectricity and consciousness

Tam Hunt writes: Life seems to be tied to bioelectricity at every level. The late electrophysiologist and surgeon Robert Becker spent decades researching the role of the body’s electric fields in development, wound healing, and limb regrowth. His 1985 book, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life, was a fascinating deep dive into how the body is electric through and through—despite our inability to see or sense these fields with our unaided senses. But Becker’s work was far…

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Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

Tam Hunt writes: Christof Koch is a neuroscientist distinguished by his rock-solid scientific work and romantic yearning to understand consciousness. He recently closed an essay by wondering: “What is it about the brain, the most complex piece of active matter in the known universe, that turns its activity into the feeling of life itself?” No coincidence with that phrasing—The Feeling of Life Itself is his latest book. He argues that consciousness is produced by the brain but that it’s also…

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Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

Sharon Begley writes: Whether crows, ravens, and other “corvids” are making multipart tools like hooked sticks to reach grubs, solving geometry puzzles made famous by Aesop, or nudging a clueless hedgehog across a highway before it becomes roadkill, they have long impressed scientists with their intelligence and creativity. Now the birds can add one more feather to their brainiac claims: Research unveiled on Thursday in Science finds that crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their…

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Ayahuasca helps traumatized war veterans rediscover their humanity

Ayahuasca helps traumatized war veterans rediscover their humanity

The New York Times reports: Before their first ayahuasca ceremony, the veterans met individually with two Peruvian “maestros,” or healers, from the Shipibo community in Peru. “Their hearts are hardened,” said Teobaldo Ochavano, who helps run the nighttime ceremonies alongside his wife, Marina Sinti. “They seemed unable to experience love or joy.” Ms. Sinti said years of interacting with foreigners on retreats had made it painfully clear why these rituals are in such high demand. “People in the United States…

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The consciousness of rats has ethical implications for humans

The consciousness of rats has ethical implications for humans

Kristin Andrews and Susana Monsó write: In the late 1990s, Jaak Panksepp, the father of affective neuroscience, discovered that rats laugh. This fact had remained hidden because rats laugh in ultrasonic chirps that we can’t hear. It was only when Brian Knutson, a member of Panksepp’s lab, started to monitor their vocalisations during social play that he realised there was something that appeared unexpectedly similar to human laughter. Panksepp and his team began to systematically study this phenomenon by tickling…

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Do we possess a transpersonal imagination?

Do we possess a transpersonal imagination?

John Horgan writes: I’m still mulling over a meeting I attended last month at Esalen, the spiritual retreat center, on “exceptional experiences” that challenge conventional science. More specifically, I’m mulling over imagination. What generates it, and what are its limits, if any? Is it sometimes more akin to revelation than invention? Imagination is arguably the quintessential human trait. Our capacity to imagine the consequences of our choices gives us free will. Lacking imagination, we’d lack art, science, mathematics, technology and…

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In science, we forget the place of human experience at our peril

In science, we forget the place of human experience at our peril

Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson write: The problem of time is one of the greatest puzzles of modern physics. The first bit of the conundrum is cosmological. To understand time, scientists talk about finding a ‘First Cause’ or ‘initial condition’ – a description of the Universe at the very beginning (or at ‘time equals zero’). But to determine a system’s initial condition, we need to know the total system. We need to make measurements of the positions and…

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Ram Dass 1931-2019

Ram Dass 1931-2019

Douglas Martin writes: [Richard] Alpert went to India in 1967, more as a tourist than as a pilgrim. Events led him to a twinkly old man wrapped in a blanket: Neem Karoli Baba, who was called Maharajji, or great king, by his followers. Maharajji appeared to read Mr. Alpert’s mind by telling him, accurately, that his mother had recently died of spleen disease — information that he said he had told no one in India. The experience caused a spiritual…

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Science as we know it can’t explain consciousness – but a revolution is coming

Science as we know it can’t explain consciousness – but a revolution is coming

MRI scan of the brain. MRIman By Philip Goff, Durham University Explaining how something as complex as consciousness can emerge from a grey, jelly-like lump of tissue in the head is arguably the greatest scientific challenge of our time. The brain is an extraordinarily complex organ, consisting of almost 100 billion cells – known as neurons – each connected to 10,000 others, yielding some ten trillion nerve connections. We have made a great deal of progress in understanding brain activity,…

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Materialism alone cannot explain the riddle of consciousness

Materialism alone cannot explain the riddle of consciousness

Adam Frank writes: Materialism holds the high ground these days in debates over that most ultimate of scientific questions: the nature of consciousness. When tackling the problem of mind and brain, many prominent researchers advocate for a universe fully reducible to matter. ‘Of course you are nothing but the activity of your neurons,’ they proclaim. That position seems reasonable and sober in light of neuroscience’s advances, with brilliant images of brains lighting up like Christmas trees while test subjects eat…

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Your brain chooses what to let you see

Your brain chooses what to let you see

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: Last week, Quanta reported on the filtering mechanisms that allow us to focus our attention on stimuli of interest — that let us tune out the music in a room to listen to a nearby conversation, or disregard greens, blues and yellows in a crowd when searching for a friend wearing red. That kind of processing, which involves the suppression of some sensory data to highlight signals that are more relevant, is directed by a goal. But…

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Consciousness doesn’t depend on language

Consciousness doesn’t depend on language

Christof Koch writes: The contrast could not have been starker—here was one of the world’s most revered figures, His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, expressing his belief that all life is sentient, while I, as a card-carrying neuroscientist, presented the contemporary Western consensus that some animals might, perhaps, possibly, share the precious gift of sentience, of conscious experience, with humans. The setting was a symposium between Buddhist monk-scholars and Western scientists in a Tibetan monastery in Southern India, fostering a…

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The whole-planet view from inner space

The whole-planet view from inner space

Rosalind Watts, Sam Gandy, and Alex Evans write: In 1966, on a rooftop overlooking San Francisco, the writer Stewart Brand felt that he could perceive the curvature of the Earth, an effect of the psychedelic substance he had consumed. He wondered why no one had photographed the Earth from space yet, and realised how much this might help people feel connected to each other and to their shared home. Later that day, he wrote in his journal: ‘Why haven’t we…

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First major center for psychedelic research opening in the U.S.

First major center for psychedelic research opening in the U.S.

Discover magazine reports: The launch of a new privately-funded research center dedicated to investigating the therapeutic benefits of psychedelic drugs was announced today at Johns Hopkins University. The Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research will be dedicated to understanding how psychedelics alter consciousness, behavior and brain function. The bulk of the research will focus on psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic” mushrooms, which has been demonstrated as a powerful tool to treat mental health afflictions. The launch comes thanks to…

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Universal emotions are the basis of our profound affinity with other animals

Universal emotions are the basis of our profound affinity with other animals

Stephen T Asma and Rami Gabriel: Charles Darwin closed his On the Origin of Species (1870) with a provocative promise that ‘light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’. In his later books The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin shed some of that promised light, especially on the evolved emotional and cognitive capacities that humans shared with other mammals. In one scandalous passage, he demonstrated that…

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