The Mystery

What differentiates conscious and non-conscious states? Depending on the context of the conversation and various definitions, when talking about sleep, consciousness can be described as the ability to integrate information in a unitary and cohesive way. Ilian and Alea talk about how limitations in our vocabulary may restrict our understanding of consciousness. Their dialogue evolves into the topic of sleep. Alea shares a personal lucid dreaming experience, where different levels of conscious awareness made her realize that she was actually in a dream state. When we talk about conscious and non-conscious states, I feel like for simplicity sake, what we're talking about when we say that one is conscious that basically means being able to integrate and process the information that's coming from the outside world. Is that correct? So, sort of like when you say, we're sleeping, ergo we're unconscious, that means even though we still sense information from the outside world s...

Some years ago the philosopher David Chalmers divided the scientific exploration of consciousness into two categories; there's the easy problem and the hard problem. The easy problem is to find neural signals that correlate with consciousness, as in this region is active when you're conscious of something. But the hard problem of consciousness is explaining why the physical stuff of the brain gives rise to subjective experience. It's a hard problem because it's not clear how physical stuff gives rise to a private internal life, that's the hard problem. Now we don't know the answer to this, but we can make progress by being very clear about the different challenges. One of them is something called 'The Binding Problem'. For example, imagine that you look out your window and you see a beautiful blue bird fly past. Different signals from the bird are processed by different regions of your brain. So part of your brain is detecting the motion, this is the dor...

Today we discover the 'Filter Theory', also known as the 'Transmission or Reductive Filter Model' of consciousness. The 'Filter Theory' arises from philosophers and neuroscience, but also aligns with many of the spiritual and religious beliefs held around the world. This perspective seems to lend itself well as a supporting theory for where consciousness originates, not just how it is interpreted biologically. The core idea of the 'Filter Theory' is that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the universe, much like 'Dark Matter', and that it exists independently of the brain and body. In this view, the brain's primary function is to limit and channel this universal consciousness into a manageable, focused stream that is suitable for navigating the physical world. In everyday life, our brains filter out an immense amount of information to help us focus on what is necessary for our survival and well-being. This means that we perceive only a ...

A group of international scientists have mapped the genetic, cellular, and structural makeup of the human brain and the nonhuman primate brain. This understanding of brain structure, achieved by funding through the National Institutes of Health’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® Initiative, or The BRAIN Initiative® , allows for a deeper knowledge of the cellular basis of brain function and dysfunction, helping pave the way for a new generation of precision therapeutics for people with mental disorders and other disorders of the brain. The findings appear in a compendium of 24 papers across Science, Science Advances, and Science Translational Medicine. “Mapping the brain’s cellular landscape is a critical step toward understanding how this vital organ works in health and disease,” said Joshua A. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., director of the National Institute of Mental Health. “These new detailed cell atlases of the human brain and the nonhuman primate brain offer a...

What is sleep? It’s when neurotransmitters, the nerve-signaling chemicals in our bodies, stop producing serotonin and norepinephrine, which keeps our brain active and awake. Instead, these neurons switch off. At the same time, a chemical known as adenosine, builds up in our blood, causing drowsiness. There are four different stages of sleep:     Stage 1: Light sleep – the phase between being awake and falling asleep.     Stage 2: The onset of sleep – body temperature drops. You may have experienced ‘hypnic jerks’ where you jump awake, or dream of falling off a curb or out of a plane…quite startling! This is quite normal. It can sometimes happen when our body and mind are winding down at different rates. If you find the frequency of hypnic jerks increasing beyond what is normal for you, working on the quality of your ‘you time’ before bed and making sure you have a consistent sleep pattern can help to reduce them.     Stage 3: Deepest and most restorative sl...

A new artificial intelligence system called a 'Semantic Decoder' can translate a person’s brain activity — while listening to a story or silently imagining telling a story — into a continuous stream of text. The system developed by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin might help people who are mentally conscious yet unable to physically speak, such as those debilitated by strokes, to communicate intelligibly again. The study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, was led by Jerry Tang, a doctoral student in computer science, and Alex Huth, an assistant professor of neuroscience and computer science at UT Austin. The work relies in part on a transformer model, similar to the ones that power Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. Unlike other language decoding systems in development, this system does not require subjects to have surgical implants, making the process noninvasive. Participants also do not need to use only words from a prescribed list. Brain activi...

If dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, as Freud claimed, then that route may be a highway full of tortuous twists and turns—leading nowhere. But it affords some spectacular vistas along the way. By turns, dreams have been deemed prophecies of the future, full of meaning—if only someone could figure out what it is—or the effluence of nerve cells randomly unwinding from a busy day. Once considered a hallmark of the periodic surges of brain activity known as rapid-eye-movement sleep, dreaming now seems somewhat less bundled up; at least 25 percent of dreams are scattered through other parts of the night. Dreaming has been seen as critical for learning, or at least important for solving problems—or as nice but unnecessary. It's an emblem of mental illness—or a safety shield deflecting it. The newest switchback on dreams comes from South African neuroscientist Mark Solms. Maybe, says Solms, we've been confusing cause and effect. Dreams, he suggests, are not a by-product of...