Consciousness

Anesthesia is very different from sleep — which is why it offers unique opportunities for studying the human brain, says the physician-researcher and statistician Emery Brown.

Consciousness is a famously hard problem, so Hod Lipson is starting from the basics: with self-aware robots that can help us understand how we think.

To make headway on the mystery of consciousness, some researchers are trying a rigorous new way to test competing theories.

A report that a fish can pass the “mirror test” for self-awareness reignites debates about how to define and measure that elusive quality.

Researchers find that when working memory gets overburdened, dialogue between three brain regions breaks down. The discovery provides new support for a larger concept about how the brain works.

New math shows how, contrary to conventional scientific wisdom, conscious beings and other macroscopic entities might have greater influence over the future than do the sum of their microscopic components.

A new theory explains how fragile quantum states may be able to exist for hours or even days in our warm, wet brain. Experiments should soon test the idea.

The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman believes that evolution and quantum mechanics conspire to make objective reality an illusion.

Studies show that computer models called "neural networks" behave strikingly similar to actual brains when performing certain tasks, suggesting the two may learn in the same way.