By Henry Taylor & The Conversation US You know that feeling when you walk into a room and immediately forget why you came in? Maybe you were there to fetch your keys. On your way to the room, you were thinking about grabbing your keys. But once you arrive, your keys have completely disappeared from your mind. This is sometimes known as the doorway effect, since it often strikes when you walk into a new room. Why does it happen? The answer has a lot to do with a faculty called working memory. Information gets stored in working memory when we need it for the tasks that we are engaged in right now (like remembering to grab your keys). What makes working memory so intriguing is its close link to consciousness. The doorway effect suggests that when information is removed from working memory, it immediately seems to leave consciousness. It also suggests that it is easy for information in working memory to be forgotten. The link between working memory and consciousness is getting increasing attention in psychology, philosophy and neuroscience. Could working memory somehow give rise to consciousness? In my new book, I explore the complex relationship between the two. Working memory: both rich and poor To understand the doorway effect, we’ll need to know a bit about working memory. One thing that makes working memory so special is that it’s so rich, both in terms of the information it has access to, and its processing power. According to recent models of working memory, it can draw information from sensory channels (vision, touch, smell etc), as well as from other memory systems such as long-term memory and also the brain’s system for processing language. In other words, working memory is where a lot of the information in your brain comes together. Once working memory has that information, there’s a lot it can do with it. Inside working memory are a host of different smaller systems for specific tasks, including visual and spatial reasoning (like solving a Rubik’s cube) and storing chunks of information (like a phone number). There’s even a “central executive” system (my favorite). The executive is like a merciless boss, assigning tasks to the different systems within working memory and keeping everything under control. © 2026 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 30309 - Posted: 07.04.2026

By Vanessa Hadid, Karim Jerbi, John W. Krakauer Late at night, in neighboring apartments, two people sit alone in front of glowing screens. A university student types into an artificial-intelligence (AI) companion he has started confiding in: “I feel like nobody really understands me.” Next door, a young professional opens a chatbot she has begun to rely on most evenings: “I tried following your advice today, but I still couldn’t finish everything I was supposed to do.” The responses appear instantly: reassuring, thoughtful, even caring. Over time, both people begin to feel these conversations are deeply genuine, as though something on the other side truly understands them. Yet nothing in these systems experiences loneliness, empathy, stress or care. They generate responses from statistical patterns learned across vast amounts of language data. As neuroscientists, we find this reaction unsurprising but concerning. It reveals something important not about machines, but about us. Humans are quick to infer the presence of a mind when behavior looks right. When language is fluent and emotionally attuned, we take it as evidence of inner experience. That intuition feels natural, but it is misleading. Today’s AI systems can sound perceptive and empathetic, yet there is no evidence that these systems are actually experiencing anything. As the use of AI companions and therapeutic tools spreads, this confusion carries real risks. The question is not whether AI is becoming conscious, but why it so easily seems that way. Here, we approach the AI consciousness debate through the lens of neuroscience. Research on nonconscious processing in the human brain shows that behavior that is complex, goal directed and even emotionally responsive can unfold without awareness. This reminds us that behavior and experience can come apart, and that we should resist treating AI’s fluent and seemingly empathetic performance as evidence of a mind. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 30275 - Posted: 06.10.2026

By Nora Bradford General anesthesia shuts off conscious awareness, but what do our brains process while we’re under? Individual neurons in a brain region known for its role in memory consolidation can detect unexpected sounds, decode the nuances of language and even predict upcoming word types in a sentence, all while a patient is fully anesthetized, researchers report May 6 in Nature. Scientists have been gathering mounting evidence that even when unconscious, our brains can track certain aspects of speech. “The field was already moving toward a more nuanced picture [of what the unconscious brain can do], but this study pushes the boundary considerably further,” says Athena Akrami, a neuroscientist at University College London who was not involved with the research. To peer into the unconscious brain, neurosurgeon Kalman Katlowitz of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and colleagues monitored activity in the hippocampi of seven anesthetized patients. The team used a technology developed within the last few years called a Neuropixels probe. These high-density microelectrodes can record the electrical activity of hundreds of individual neurons simultaneously, rather than listening to the collective activity of groups of neurons. The team inserted these probes into patients’ hippocampi, in tissue slated for surgical removal as part of epilepsy treatment. While the patients were under general anesthesia, the researchers played various sounds through headphones. For some patients, this consisted of a series of uniform pure tones interspersed with occasional, unexpected “oddball” tones of a different frequency. For others, the researchers played 10 to 20 minutes of educational videos and storytelling podcasts, like The Moth Radio Hour, to evaluate how the brain processes natural speech. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 30265 - Posted: 06.03.2026

By Nora Bradford If you were to imagine a waterfall, a misty cascade into an azure pool surrounded by towering trees might come to mind. That mental vision might also be accompanied by the imagined roar of water splashing down. But when it comes to our brains, does imagining a waterfall activate different areas compared with seeing or hearing one in real life? For both sounds and sights, the overlap between imagination and perception appears not in brain areas linked to a single sense, but in high-level areas that accept multiple types of sensory inputs, researchers report March 31 in Neuron. For years, cognitive neuroscientist Rodrigo Braga has been working to determine whether the human brain is processing mental imagery through hearing and other senses or whether something else is at play. “When I was a teenager, I remember the first time realizing that there’s like a voice I can hear in my head and thinking, ‘Oh, that’s really strange’,” says Braga, of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. In this study, he and his colleagues prompted eight participants to imagine scenes, faces, someone else speaking, internal monologues and sounds while in an MRI scanner. The small number of individuals allowed the researchers to collect hours of MRI data to create individualized brain maps rather than averaging across individuals. This technique allowed the team to reliably find individual variation in brain activity during imagination. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Cells and Structure of the Nervous System
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 2: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Link ID: 30214 - Posted: 04.26.2026

Nicholas Humphrey In his novel Penguin Island (1908), Anatole France spins a wonderful tale about a blind old monk who sets off from Brittany on a mission to the Hebrides and lands on an island inhabited only by penguins. Though the birds speak a strange language, he assumes they must be human beings. So he proceeds to baptise them. When the news of this reaches heaven, it causes a major stir. God himself is embarrassed. He gathers an assembly of clerics and doctors, and asks them for an opinion on the delicate question of whether the birds must now be given souls. It is a matter of more than theoretical importance. ‘The Christian state,’ St Cornelius points out, ‘is not without serious inconveniences for a penguin … The habits of birds are, in many points, contrary to the commandments of the Church …’ After lengthy discussion, they settle on a compromise. The baptised penguins are indeed to be granted souls – but, on St Catherine’s recommendation, their souls are to be of small size. For the penguins, souls were an unexpected bonus. As René Descartes, the philosopher-scientist of the 17th century, had explained, nonhuman animals in general, in a state of nature, are mere soulless machines. Here’s a sketch of a Cartesian penguin, without even a smidgen of a soul. Descartes believed that humans too are machines of a kind. But he held that, with humans, thankfully, God has arranged the addition of a soul as standard practice. Early in infancy, the material substance of the human brain is put into communication via the pineal gland with the separate substance of the mind: res extensa (extended stuff) is joined by res cogitans (thinking stuff). The consciousness that results lays the foundation for the soul. © Aeon Media Group Ltd. 2012-2026

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 30204 - Posted: 04.18.2026

By Katie Engelhart The doctor told her that her husband was just a vegetable now. “And he’s always just going to be a vegetable.” Did he really say it like that? Vegetable? And, just? Well, that’s how she remembers it. In his notes, the doctor wrote that his patient’s prognosis was “Poor/Grave.” A few weeks earlier, on Oct. 4, 2024, while on a trip out of town, Aaron Williams said that his stomach hurt. Then he started vomiting and couldn’t stop, and then he started screaming. His wife, Tabitha, tried to drive him back home to Aiken, S.C. — and she was almost there, maybe 30 minutes away, when Aaron’s body stiffened and his limbs flung out and he went quiet. At the hospital, Aaron, who was 30, was found to be in cardiac arrest. Doctors performed CPR, and when it did not work, they did it again and again; Aaron’s small, lithe body — just 5-foot-8, 135 pounds — heaved under the force of it, until after five rounds of compressions his heart started beating again. Doctors inserted a breathing tube and attached it to a ventilator next to Aaron’s bed. Sitting at her comatose husband’s side, Tabitha could hear its quiet mechanical hiss. As it turned out, Aaron, who has Type 1 diabetes, had not been taking his insulin. Part of it, maybe, was hubris; he had been a diabetic since forever, and he thought he knew his body well enough to know when his glucose levels were really off-kilter. Also, he didn’t have a prescription; Aaron and Tabitha had recently moved, with five of their children, and he still hadn’t found a new family doctor who would take Medicaid. Doctors did a CT scan, an electroencephalogram (EEG) and later an M.R.I., and they saw evidence of a global anoxic brain injury and “severe cortical dysfunction.” There was cerebral swelling too: so much that his brain pushed outward against his skull, partly flattening the folds and ridges that covered its surface. When he was examined, Aaron had no blink reflex, and he didn’t respond to sound. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 30202 - Posted: 04.15.2026

By Jennie Erin Smith Can a “friendly” rivalry between two artificial intelligence (AI) agents help reveal how the brain supports consciousness? That’s the suggestion coma researcher Martin Monti and his colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles make in a paper published today in Nature Neuroscience. One of their two AI models generated realistic imitations of electrical patterns seen in conscious and unconscious brain states, from wakefulness to deep comas. Its counterpart had to identify these states. The results largely support established ideas about how the brain behaves during comas, vegetative states, and other disorders of consciousness. But they also suggest roles for a brain structure and a pattern of cell signaling not previously known to be involved in such disorders—predictions the scientists were able to test. Monti spoke with Science about how the paper’s two models, which he calls the “black box” and the “glass brain,” could reveal new ways to restore consciousness after brain injury. This interview has been edited for clarity and lengt Q: You built two AI models, with one designed to interrogate the other. Can you explain how they talk to each other? A: So here’s the game: We have two friends. One—let’s call it the black box—knows how to tell consciousness from unconsciousness. It’s been trained on 680,000 snippets of EEG [electroencephalography] data from animals and people in different states of consciousness. The other—think of it as a glass brain—is a real, biologically plausible simulation of the human brain. We tell it, “Your job is to move all of your knobs, every single parameter you’ve got, to trick the other guy—the black box—to think that you’re creating a real EEG of a conscious or unconscious state.” Now, we ask the glass brain, “Which brain parameters made the box think the EEG was unconscious?” © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 30176 - Posted: 03.25.2026

Nate Scharping Whether or not we have free will is a question philosophers have been debating for millennia. In the early 1980s, there was a brief moment when it appeared the debate may finally have been settled. The potential solution came not from philosophy, but neuroscience. The answer, somewhat depressingly, was that free will didn’t exist. Experiments carried out by the neuroscientist Benjamin Libet appeared to show decisions being made in the brain before people were even aware of them. It was as if science had finally revealed the strings of the puppet master controlling our thoughts and actions. To even casual observers of the history of inquiries into free will, this pronouncement felt premature. Thankfully, they were right. Scientists today are much more sceptical not only of the idea that free will doesn’t exist, but also of the notion that brain scans will ever definitively prove or disprove its existence. But why? Ultimately, the question of free will may be best left to philosophers, but that doesn’t mean it’s a topic neuroscientists should ignore. Experiments into how the human brain makes decisions have led to important insights into neurology and psychology, and have expanded our understanding of the brain’s inner workings. Those experiments include the ones Libet conducted in the 1980s, which, although viewed in a more critical light now, paved the way for decades of innovative research. The experiments were simple. Libet attached volunteers to an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine to monitor their brain activity, then placed a button in front of them and asked them to decide when they wanted to press it. While they were deciding, they had to watch a timer, consisting of a dot moving around the inside of a circle (like a second hand on a clock). Each volunteer had to note the dot’s position when they decided to press the button. With the EEGs, Libet was looking for something called a readiness potential, a build-up of activity in the brain’s motor cortex that precedes a muscle movement. He was hoping to see how a volunteer’s awareness of their decision to move (their noting of the dot’s position) lined up with their readiness potential. © Our Media 2026

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 30171 - Posted: 03.21.2026

By Brianne Kane, Fonda Mwangi, Alex Sugiura, Kylie Murphy, Jeffery DelViscio & Kendra Pierre-Louis In this episode of Science Quickly, journalist Michael Pollan joins Scientific American’s Bri Kane to unpack why consciousness is so hard to define in a discussion that explores what brain science, artificial intelligence experiments and even psychedelics might reveal about how awareness works. Bri Kane: Just to get us going on something really easy I wanted to ask you, Michael Pollan: Are you conscious, do you know if I’m conscious, and are you 100 percent certain that this microphone is not conscious? Michael Pollan: I can’t be sure you’re conscious. I have to infer that from the evidence: that you’re the same species as me, and our species can be conscious, and we have something called philosophy of mind, which is an imaginative faculty that allows us to imagine what other people are thinking. I know I’m conscious, I think. That’s actually the thing we know with the greatest certainty. I mean, [René] Descartes told us that 400 years ago: The only thing we can be sure of is the fact that we exist, and we are conscious. Everything else is an inference. So I’m inferring you’re conscious, and I’m gonna operate on that basis, if it’s okay. And then the microphone, the microphone hasn’t shown me any evidence of consciousness. Kane: So I mean, like you’re saying, there’s only so much evidence to point to for consciousness; some of it is kind of just your gut understanding. And our February cover issue this year was about these 29 different theories of consciousness, which you’ve covered is further evidence that science is really floundering on finding some solid ground on: What is consciousness, and how can we provide evidence to prove this, to tackle this subject with science? But your work seems to really discuss when science and philosophy start rubbing up against each other, which I think is why you get into some really interesting questions in this book. So I wanted to ask you: What theory, out of those 29, do you find yourself leaning towards that seems like the most probable understanding of consciousness? © 2025 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 30153 - Posted: 03.07.2026

By Tim Vernimmen Steve Fleming’s research is definitely “meta” — a Greek prefix indicating self-reference. He’s a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London who studies metacognition: what we know about what we know, think about what we think, believe about what we believe. While this may seem quite philosophical and well-nigh impossible to study in the lab, he has made it his mission to measure and model it and understand where in the brain it manifests itself. Fleming explored these issues in his 2021 book, Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness. In the 2024 Annual Review of Psychology, he further examined the link between metacognition and confidence: our sense of whether we have made the right decision, whether we are successful at the tasks presented to us, and whether our worldview is likely correct. Fleming’s work is casting new light on why some people seem chronically underconfident even when they’re doing just fine, and why others are entirely convinced they’re right about everything, even when there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In the following discussion, which has been edited for length and clarity, Fleming shared his thoughts on some of the questions that inevitably come up when our brains assess their own activity. Metacognition is quite an uncommon research topic. How did you end up studying this? I studied experimental psychology in Oxford, where I had the opportunity to work with psychologist Paul Azzopardi. He studies blindsight, a condition where, due to certain types of brain damage, people are subjectively blind but still able to perform various tasks using visual information. This presents a fascinating dissociation between conscious experience and actual functionality.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 30142 - Posted: 02.28.2026

By Alexa Robles-Gil Having an imaginary friend, playing house or daydreaming about the future were long considered uniquely human abilities. Now, scientists have conducted the first study indicating that apes have the ability to play pretend as well. The findings, published Thursday in the journal Science, suggest that imagination is within the cognitive potential of an ape and can possibly be traced back to our common evolutionary ancestors. “This is one of those things that we assume is distinct about our species,” said Christopher Krupenye, a cognitive scientist at Johns Hopkins University and an author of the study. “This kind of finding really shows us that there’s much more richness to these animals’ minds than people give them credit for,” he said. Researchers knew that apes were capable of certain kinds of imagination. If an ape watches someone hide food in a cup, it can imagine that the food is there despite not seeing it. Because that perception is the reality — the food is actually there — it requires the ape to sustain only one view of the world, the one that it knows to be true. “This kind of work goes beyond it,” Dr. Krupenye said. “Because it suggests that they can, at the same time, consider multiple views of the world and really distinguish what’s real from what’s imaginary.” Bonobos, an endangered species found only in the Democratic Republic of Congo, are difficult to study in the wild. For this research, Dr. Krupenye and Amalia Bastos, a cognitive scientist at the University of St. Andrews, relied on an organization known as the Ape Initiative to study Kanzi, a male bonobo famous for demonstrating some understanding of spoken English. (Kanzi was an enculturated ape born in captivity; he died last year at age 44.) © 2026 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 30112 - Posted: 02.07.2026

By Allison Parshall Until half a billion years ago, life on Earth was slow. The seas were home to single-celled microbes and largely stationary soft-bodied creatures. But at the dawn of the Cambrian era, some 540 million years ago, everything exploded. Bodies diversified in all directions, and many organisms developed appendages that let them move quickly around their environment. These ecosystems became competitive places full of predators and prey. And our branch of the tree of life evolved an incredible structure to navigate it all: the brain. We don’t know whether this was the moment when consciousness first arose on Earth. But it might have been when living creatures began to really need something like it to combine a barrage of sensory information into one unified experience that could guide their actions. It’s because of this ability to experience that, eventually, we began to feel pain and pleasure. Eventually, we became guided not just by base needs but by curiosity, emotions and introspection. Over time we became aware of ourselves. This last step is what we have to thank for most of art, science and philosophy—and the millennia-long quest to understand consciousness itself. This state of awareness of ourselves and our environment comes with many mysteries. Why does being awake and alive, being yourself, feel like anything at all, and where does this singular sense of awareness come from in the brain? These questions may have objective answers, but because they are about private, subjective experiences that can’t be directly measured, they exist at the very boundaries of what the scientific method can reveal. Still, in the past 30 years neuroscientists scouring the brain for the so-called neural correlates of consciousness have learned a lot. Their search has revealed constellations of brain networks whose connections help to explain what happens when we lose consciousness. We now have troves of data and working theories, some with mind-bending implications. We have tools to help us detect consciousness in people with brain injuries. But we still don’t have easy answers—researchers can’t even agree on what consciousness is, let alone how best to reveal its secrets. The past few years have seen accusations of pseudoscience, results that challenge leading theories, and the uneasy feeling of a field at a crossroads. © 2025 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Cells and Structure of the Nervous System
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 2: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Link ID: 30090 - Posted: 01.21.2026

By Kristen French In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that within 25 years, scientists would discover the neural correlates of consciousness. He was certain that we were on the cusp of solving the so-called hard problem: how the physical flesh of the brain gives way to the everyday streams of feelings, sensations, and thoughts that make up our waking experience. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . That bet didn’t go well for Koch: A couple of years ago, he paid up, delivering a case of fine wine to his opponent on a conference stage in New York City. But many scientists still believe that the scientific keys to the kingdom of consciousness are within reach. Lately, some are focusing their attention on a new technology called transcranial focused ultrasound, in which acoustic waves are transmitted through the skull deep into the interior tissues. These waves can be used to stimulate specific target areas as small as a few millimeters in size and to monitor the changes that result. Now, two researchers from MIT have mapped out specific ways to use the technology to chip away at the hard problem. Because transcranial focused ultrasound offers a powerful and noninvasive way to alter brain activity, it will allow scientists to track cause-and-effect for the first time, they argue. In a new paper, published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, they plot out a series of experiments that will aim to answer how consciousness arises in the brain—and where. “Transcranial focused ultrasound will let you stimulate different parts of the brain in healthy subjects, in ways you just couldn’t before,” Daniel Freeman, an MIT researcher and co-author of the paper, explained in a statement. “This is a tool that’s not just useful for medicine or even basic science, but could also help address the hard problem of consciousness. It can probe where in the brain are the neural circuits that generate a sense of pain, a sense of vision, or even something as complex as human thought.” © 2026 NautilusNext Inc.,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 30086 - Posted: 01.17.2026

By Rachel Barr Philosophers and scientists have always kept close company. Look back far enough, and it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Before we had instruments to measure reality, we had to reason our way into it, but that intellectual lineage is what eventually gave us the scientific method. As technology advanced and the scope for observation expanded, specializations splintered off from philosophy to reconstitute as the sciences. Astronomy cleared the sky of deities and showed us a universe governed by gravity, not gods. Geography mapped a not-so-flat Earth, then geology dated it, stratifying earthly time in isotopes and sedimentary layers. Physics folded time into space, and with it, reimagined us not as beings apart from nature, but as a continuation of its energy and mass. We are not, as Pink Floyd suggested, “lost souls swimming in a fishbowl.” We are matter, muddling our way through life in relativistic motion. Now, in the 21st century, science is tracing a map through the other great unknown: the mind. Advances in biophotonics and neuroimaging have brought us closer than ever to a material picture of the mind, but the questions we’re now brushing up against aren’t melting away under empirical gaze. Instead, neuroscience has wandered back to philosophy’s front door, testing the limits of its most durable questions. 1. Free will In the early 19th century, French physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace imagined the Universe as clockwork, each gear turning in obedience to natural law. He conceived of a demon who, knowing the position and momentum of every particle, could predict the future with perfect accuracy. This thought experiment crystallizes classical determinism: a world where there is no freedom, only inevitability.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 30068 - Posted: 01.07.2026

Luiz Pessoa When thousands of starlings swoop and swirl in the evening sky, creating patterns called murmurations, no single bird is choreographing this aerial ballet. Each bird follows simple rules of interaction with its closest neighbours, yet out of these local interactions emerges a complex, coordinated dance that can respond swiftly to predators and environmental changes. This same principle of emergence – where sophisticated behaviours arise not from central control but from the interactions themselves – appears across nature and human society. Consider how market prices emerge from countless individual trading decisions, none of which alone contains the ‘right’ price. Each trader acts on partial information and personal strategies, yet their collective interaction produces a dynamic system that integrates information from across the globe. Human language evolves through a similar process of emergence. No individual or committee decides that ‘LOL’ should enter common usage or that the meaning of ‘cool’ should expand beyond temperature (even in French-speaking countries). Instead, these changes result from millions of daily linguistic interactions, with new patterns of speech bubbling up from the collective behaviour of speakers. These examples highlight a key characteristic of highly interconnected systems: the rich interplay of constituent parts generates properties that defy reductive analysis. This principle of emergence, evident across seemingly unrelated fields, provides a powerful lens for examining one of our era’s most elusive mysteries: how the brain works. The core idea of emergence inspired me to develop the concept I call the entangled brain: the need to understand the brain as an interactionally complex system where functions emerge from distributed, overlapping networks of regions rather than being localised to specific areas. Though the framework described here is still a minority view in neuroscience, we’re witnessing a gradual paradigm transition (rather than a revolution), with increasing numbers of researchers acknowledging the limitations of more traditional ways of thinking. © Aeon Media Group Ltd. 2012-2026.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 30066 - Posted: 01.03.2026

By Sara Talpos It’s been more than a decade since scientists first started publishing papers on neural organoids, the small clusters of cells grown in labs and designed to mimic various parts of the human brain. Since then, organoids have been used to study everything from bipolar disorder and Alzheimer’s disease, to tumors and parasitic infections. Because these new tools have the potential to reduce the use of animals in research — a goal of the current Trump administration — the field’s future may be more financially secure than other areas of scientific research. In September, for example, the federal government announced an $87 million investment into organoid research broadly. Matthew Owen brings a unique perspective to this emerging field. As a philosopher of mind, he focuses on trying to understand both what the mind is and how it relates to the body and the brain. He draws on the work of historical philosophers and applies some of their ideas to modern-day science. In 2020, as a visiting scholar in a neuroscience lab at McGill University, he was introduced to researchers working with organoids. Owen, who also does research in bioethics, wanted to help them address a perhaps unsettling question: Could these miniature cell clusters ever develop consciousness? Some experts believe that organoid consciousness is not likely to happen anytime in the near future, if at all. Still, certain experiments are prompting the question. In 2022, for example, researchers, including Brett Kagan of the Australian start-up Cortical Labs, published a paper explaining how they had taught their lab-grown brain cells to play a ping-pong-like video game. (Because the cells were placed in a single layer, the structures were not technically organoids, though they are expected to have similar capabilities.) In the process, the authors wrote, the tiny cell clusters displayed “sentience.” Undark recently spoke with Owen about this particular experiment and about his own writing on organoids.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 30048 - Posted: 12.13.2025

Mariana Lenharo In late 2005, five months after a car accident, a 23-year-old woman lay unresponsive in a hospital bed. She had a severe brain injury and showed no sign of awareness. But when researchers scanning her brain asked her to imagine playing tennis, something striking happened: brain areas linked to movement lit up on her scan1. The experiment, conceived by neuroscientist Adrian Owen and his colleagues, suggested that the woman understood the instructions and decided to cooperate — despite appearing to be unresponsive. Owen, now at Western University in London, Canada, and his colleagues had introduced a new way to test for consciousness. Whereas some previous tests relied on observing general brain activity, this strategy zeroed in on activity directly linked to a researcher’s verbal command. The strategy has since been applied to hundreds of unresponsive people, revealing that many maintain an inner life and are aware of the world around them, at least to some extent. A 2024 study found that one in four people who were physically unresponsive had brain activity that suggested they could understand and follow commands to imagine specific activities, such as playing tennis or walking through a familiar space2. The tests rely on advanced neuroimaging techniques, so are mostly limited to research settings because of their high costs and the needed expertise. But since 2018, medical guidelines have started to recommend using these tests in clinical practice3. Since these methods emerged, scientists have been developing ways to probe layers of consciousness that are even more hidden. The stakes are high. Tens of thousands of people worldwide are currently in a persistent unresponsive state. Assessing their consciousness can guide important treatment decisions, such as whether to keep them on life support. Studies also suggest that hospitalized, unresponsive people with hidden signs of awareness are more likely to recover than are those without such signs (see, for example, ref. 4). © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 29875 - Posted: 08.02.2025

By Tim Bayne One of the key scientific questions about consciousness concerns its distribution. We know that adult humans have the capacity for consciousness, but what about human neonates, bees or artificial intelligence (AI) systems? Who else—other than ourselves—belongs in the “consciousness club,” and how might we figure this out? It is tempting to assume, as many do, that we need a theory of consciousness to answer the distribution question. In the words of neuroscientists Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch, “we need not only more data but also a theory of consciousness—one that says what experience is and what type of physical systems can have it.” This is what philosopher Jonathan Birch has labeled the “theory-heavy” approach to the distribution problem. But there are serious issues with the theory-heavy approach. One is that we don’t have a consensus theory of consciousness. In a highly selective review that Anil Seth and I published in 2022, we listed no fewer than 22 neurobiological theories of consciousness. This overabundance of theories could reasonably be ignored if most agreed on fundamental questions in the field, such as which systems have the capacity for consciousness or the question of when consciousness first emerges in human development, but they don’t. A further problem with the theory-heavy approach is that in order to speak to the distribution problem, a theory cannot be restricted to consciousness as it occurs in adult humans, but must also apply to human infants, nonhuman animals, synthetic biological systems and AI. But because theories are largely based on data drawn from the study of adult humans, there will inevitably be a gap between the evidence base of a general theory and its scope. Why should we think that a theory developed in response to adult humans applies to different kinds of systems? © 2025 Simons Foundation

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 29874 - Posted: 08.02.2025

Dobromir Rahnev Is it possible to upload the consciousness of your mind into a computer? – Amreen, age 15, New Delhi, India The concept, cool yet maybe a little creepy, is known as mind uploading. Think of it as a way to create a copy of your brain, a transmission of your mind and consciousness into a computer. There you would live digitally, perhaps forever. You’d have an awareness of yourself, you’d retain your memories and still feel like you. But you wouldn’t have a body. Within that simulated environment, you could do anything you do in real life – eating, driving a car, playing sports. You could also do things impossible in the real world, like walking through walls, flying like a bird or traveling to other planets. The only limit is what science can realistically simulate. Doable? Theoretically, mind uploading should be possible. Still, you may wonder how it could happen. After all, researchers have barely begun to understand the brain. Yet science has a track record of turning theoretical possibilities into reality. Just because a concept seems terribly, unimaginably difficult doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Consider that science took humankind to the Moon, sequenced the human genome and eradicated smallpox. Those things too were once considered unlikely. As a brain scientist who studies perception, I fully expect mind uploading to one day be a reality. But as of today, we’re nowhere close. Learn about the latest, most interesting health and science research © 2010–2025, The Conversation US, Inc.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 29803 - Posted: 05.24.2025

By Carl Zimmer Consciousness may be a mystery, but that doesn’t mean that neuroscientists don’t have any explanations for it. Far from it. “In the field of consciousness, there are already so many theories that we don’t need more theories,” said Oscar Ferrante, a neuroscientist at the University of Birmingham. If you’re looking for a theory to explain how our brains give rise to subjective, inner experiences, you can check out Adaptive Resonance Theory. Or consider Dynamic Core Theory. Don’t forget First Order Representational Theory, not to mention semantic pointer competition theory. The list goes on: A 2021 survey identified 29 different theories of consciousness. Dr. Ferrante belongs to a group of scientists who want to lower that number, perhaps even down to just one. But they face a steep challenge, thanks to how scientists often study consciousness: Devise a theory, run experiments to build evidence for it, and argue that it’s better than the others. “We are not incentivized to kill our own ideas,” said Lucia Melloni, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany. Seven years ago, Dr. Melloni and 41 other scientists embarked on a major study on consciousness that she hoped would break this pattern. Their plan was to bring together two rival groups to design an experiment to see how well both theories did at predicting what happens in our brains during a conscious experience. The team, called the Cogitate Consortium, published its results on Wednesday in the journal Nature. But along the way, the study became subject to the same sharp-elbowed conflicts they had hoped to avoid. Dr. Melloni and a group of like-minded scientists began drawing up plans for their study in 2018. They wanted to try an approach known as adversarial collaboration, in which scientists with opposing theories join forces with neutral researchers. The team chose two theories to test. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 29773 - Posted: 05.03.2025