Educational Science

How Can You Tell if Someone (or Something) Is Conscious?

How can you know that any animal, other human beings, or anything that seems conscious, isn't just faking it? Does it enjoy an internal subjective experience, complete with sensations and emotions like hunger, joy, or sadness? After all, the only consciousness you can know with certainty is your own. Everything...

Do octopuses dream of 8-armed sheep? New study hints at human-like sleep cycle in cephalopods

When octopuses snooze on the seafloor, their skin sometimes pulses with an array of colors, and at other times, they become pale and plain. These alternating patterns mark two distinct stages of the octopus sleep cycle, a small study suggests. During active sleep, when an octopus's skin ripples with dazzling...

Scientists have blasted the brains of mice and rats with ultrasound to knock them into a hibernation-like state, and the researchers say the technique could one day be used on injured humans in critical care or on astronauts taking long-haul spaceflights. The first-of-its-kind method — which works by firing ultrasound...

Dream-shaping tech from MIT channels suggestions into your dreams

MIT scientists have figured out how to manipulate your dreams by combining an app with a sleep-tracking device called Dormio. In their new study, the researchers were able to insert certain topics into a person's dreams, with some pretty bizarre outcomes. To do so, the researchers at MIT Media Lab's...

'Alien abduction' stories may come from lucid dreaming, study hints

Lucid dreaming, in which people are partially aware and can control their dreams during sleep, could explain so-called alien abduction stories, a study suggests. Claims of such abductions date to the 19th century; the circumstances of the kidnappings often sound dreamlike and trigger feelings of terror and paralysis. Certain dream...

How Does Consciousness Arise in the Brain?

Humans have learned to travel through space, eradicate diseases and understand nature at the breathtakingly tiny level of fundamental particles. Yet we have no idea how consciousness — our ability to experience and learn about the world in this way and report it to others — arises in the brain....

Does Consciousness Pervade the Universe?

One of science's most challenging problems is a question that can be stated easily: Where does consciousness come from? In his new book Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, philosopher Philip Goff considers a radical perspective: What if consciousness is not something special that the brain does...

Can our brains help prove the universe is conscious?

As humans, we know we are conscious because we experience and feel things. Yet scientists and great thinkers are unable to explain what consciousness is and they are equally baffled about where it comes from. Consciousness — or better, conscious experience — is obviously a part of reality, said Johannes...

Do Dreams Really Reveal Our Deepest Secrets?

You jolt awake in the middle of the night, your heart pounding. It takes you a moment to realize that, no, you didn't just rush out for a job interview wearing nothing but a bath towel. Depending on which dream interpretation dictionary you consult, you might find that your dream...

What God, quantum mechanics and consciousness have in common

In my 20s, I had a friend who was brilliant, charming, Ivy-educated and rich, heir to a family fortune. I'll call him Gallagher. He could do anything he wanted. He experimented, dabbling in neuroscience, law, philosophy and other fields. But he was so critical, so picky, that he never settled...