Esketamine, a drug approved for treatment-resistant depression, may also treat postpartum depression (PPD) and reduce depression risk in offspring. In a mouse model of chronic unpredictable mild stress during pregnancy, both mothers with PPD and their adult offspring showed anxiety- and depression-like behaviors. Injecting esketamine into postpartum mice improved these behaviors: it enhanced exploration in unfamiliar environments, increased preference for sucrose, and restored impaired BDNF/AKT/mTOR signaling in the frontal lobe and hippocampus. The findings suggest esketamine has potential for treating PPD and lowering the incidence of depression in the next generation.
This paper presents a methodological framework for analyzing any candidate consciousness object—human, AI, extraterrestrial, pathological, or grey-zone—without asking what consciousness is. It proposes three structural propositions: remainder as the primary classification line, growth direction as the internal phase of real consciousness, and cross-category grey zones as structural residue. From these, three categories and five phases emerge: real consciousness (self, self-to-be, self-to-cure), quasi-consciousness, and class-consciousness. AI is classified as class-consciousness, not quasi-consciousness, because it does not produce the structural remainder that real and quasi-consciousness do. The framework includes four core theorems, four subject conditions, seven rays, and four falsifiable predictions. It does not replace ethical discussion.
A theoretical paper proposes that consciousness transitions across the sleep-wake cycle can be explained by the sequential disassembly and reassembly of Dimensional Domain (DD) layers within the Self-as-an-End (SAE) framework. DD layers depend asymmetrically on lower layers, and sleep involves layer-by-layer deconstruction and reconstruction. Temporal mismatches in this process are argued to account for phenomena including hypnic jerks, sleep inertia, lucid dreams, sleepwalking, sleep paralysis, night terrors, false awakenings, inability to run in dreams, incorporation of external stimuli into dreams, and rapid dream forgetting. General anesthesia is presented as a contrast case where layers are suppressed nearly synchronously, producing fewer mixed states than sleep. The paper provides a hypothesis activation matrix with evidence-tier annotations and three falsifiable predictions.