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Consciousness
How does the mind interact with the body? Nobody really knows — but these philosophers ventured an answer.
If you look into a mirror, you'll notice that left-and-right are reversed, but up-and-down is preserved. The reason isn't what you think.
From consciousness to nothingness and beyond, these questions still baffle the brightest minds. Will they ever be solved?
The Universe is grand, awe-inspiring, and greater than we likely imagine. Even astrophysicists get anxious thinking about it, but we cope.
Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy utilizes a non-ordinary state of consciousness to heal.
Psychedelics mess with our prior beliefs, and could help us see what forms these beliefs in the first place.
Science cannot help us understand or describe first-person experience. Zen koans are a powerful form for helping us reach that description.
Depression might be similar to dreaming.
Some scientists think brain organoids could develop a form of consciousness. Others say that's science fiction.
"I am an anthropologist, and for years, I have spoken to people who have had these experiences."
John Templeton Foundation
The information we have in the Universe is finite and limited, but our curiosity and wonder is forever insatiable. And always will be.
In the early 20th century, a young biochemist named Alexander Oparin set out to connect “the world of the living” to “the world of the dead.”
It was originally recorded in the 1970s by cognitive psychologists Harry McGurk and John MacDonald.
Belief in God and the afterlife increased, while belief in superstition decreased.
Maybe the brain isn't "classical" after all.
Recent discoveries about bodily awareness have changed how scientists think about the nature of consciousness.
Maybe our understanding of quantum entanglement is incomplete, or maybe there is something fundamentally unique about consciousness.
Meditators invert the relationship between the layers of self-processing.
Psychologists are exploring this creepy feeling of having already lived through an experience before.
The separation of conjoined twins is fraught with stomach-churning biomedical and ethical challenges.
At a fundamental level, only a few particles and forces govern all of reality. How do their combinations create human consciousness?
the human brain remains highly responsive to sound during sleep, but it does not receive feedback from higher order areas — sort of like an orchestra with “the conductor missing.”
The engineer working on Google's AI, called LaMDA, suffers from what we could call Michelangelo Syndrome. Scientists must beware hubris.
What if intelligence can thrive without consciousness?
One theory for catatonia is that it is similar to an animal's “death feint.”
Humans who've lived through the same events often remember them differently. Could quantum physics be responsible?
Signals from the environment, such as those detected by your sense organs, have no inherent psychological meaning. Your brain creates the meaning.
John Templeton Foundation
Plants are very sensitive to touch, with research showing that touching a plant can change its genome and launch a cascade of plant hormones.
If we are wreaking havoc on ourselves and the world, it is because we have become mesmerized by a mechanistic, reductionist way of thinking.