Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
April 2, 2026
Juan Moises de la Serna
This umbrella review synthesizes findings from multiple high-rigor reviews on the neural correlates of consciousness. It identifies consistent patterns of brain activity associated with conscious awareness, particularly in frontoparietal and thalamocortical networks. The review suggests that specific neural signatures, such as widespread cortical connectivity and recurrent processing, are reliably linked to conscious perception. It also notes that no single brain region is solely responsible for consciousness, but rather distributed networks play a key role. The authors indicate that methodological advances in neuroimaging have improved the precision of these findings, though variability across studies remains. The review underscores the need for continued research to refine theoretical models of consciousness.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
April 2, 2026
David M. Remmer
Reanalysis of a prior study on DMT's effect on brain waves shows that the drug does not selectively increase forward (bottom-up) traveling waves. Instead, DMT causes a collapse of both forward and backward wave power at alpha (8–13 Hz) and broadband (2–100 Hz) frequencies in all 12 subjects. The backward collapse is slightly larger (2.3–5.1 percentage points). The earlier reported increase in normalized forward power was an artifact of the surrogate baseline dropping faster than the signal. At the peak effect, forward and backward alpha power were statistically indistinguishable, and the forward signal did not significantly differ from zero. The brain's directional wave structure under DMT is lost rather than reorganized.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
April 2, 2026
Clifton Bacon
A proposed experimental test examines whether human consciousness influences quantum state reduction, as suggested by the von Neumann–Wigner interpretation. The experiment would place experienced meditators in EEG-verified states of objectless awareness inside shielded underground laboratories and measure quantum decoherence rates across four conditions: empty chamber, sleep, active cognition, and no-thought meditation. The design aims to discriminate between the von Neumann–Wigner interpretation, environmental decoherence theory, and Orchestrated Objective Reduction based on their distinct predictions. A secondary experiment tests consciousness–randomness interaction using quantum random number generators with improved methodology over prior work. Null results would establish upper bounds on consciousness-dependent decoherence effects. No confirmed mechanism for the hypothesized effect exists.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
April 1, 2026
Washburn, Jon
A new mathematical framework, Recognition Science, explains why the brain produces DMT, a molecule that both protects neurons during oxygen deprivation and induces near-death experiences. The model treats DMT as a specific rung on a mathematical ladder, where activating sigma-1 receptors lowers a cellular cost barrier. This framework predicts that DMT will boost brain waves at about 8.09 Hz, that electromagnetic shielding will reduce shared brain patterns between people, and that related compounds will show specific ratios. The authors show that neuroprotection and near-death experience phenomenology are mathematically the same operation on a fundamental channel.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
April 1, 2026
Juan Moises de la Serna
A synthesis of meta-analytic evidence on consciousness and brain networks integrates major theoretical frameworks, including the Global Workspace theory and Integrated Information Theory (IIT). The analysis suggests that conscious states are associated with widespread, integrated neural activity across multiple brain networks, rather than being localized to a single region. This integration of theoretical perspectives points toward a more unified understanding of the neural correlates of consciousness, emphasizing the importance of global information integration and widespread neural communication.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
April 1, 2026
Clifton Bacon
A theoretical paper proposes a new experimental framework called the Silence Paradigm, which systematically subtracts energy from both the environment and the observer to detect phenomena inaccessible to traditional energy-additive physics. The framework places experienced meditators in states of objectless awareness inside deep underground laboratories equipped with sensitive instruments to address eleven open problems in fundamental physics, including dark matter, quantum gravity, and the measurement problem. The authors argue that the observer's conscious state becomes the primary experimental variable and that competing theories of consciousness can make distinguishable predictions within the same experiment. Null results are designed to be scientifically valuable by establishing upper bounds on consciousness-matter interaction.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 31, 2026
Tenzin Trepp
Across several philosophical and spiritual traditions—Neoplatonism, Advaita Vedānta, Mahāyāna Buddhism, Taoism, and Kabbalah—reflective inquiry that exhausts the subject–object structure of experience converges on a concept of bare existence, bare presence, or bare awareness at the threshold of the sayable. These traditions display striking structural convergences despite divergent doctrinal content, articulating a minimal-dual consciousness as an introspective limit-concept. The analysis employs phenomenological, metaphysical, and psychological approaches, distinguishing convergent structural insights from divergent metaphysical commitments. The conclusion advocates a pluralistic approach that honors both the shared boundary-experience and the irreducible particularity of each tradition's insights, offering an open cartography of the "unsayable."
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 31, 2026
(曹方石) Cao Fangshi
A person with extraordinarily high dream recall experiences long, coherent, plot-driven dreams with distinct characters, emotional tone, and a stable spatial world map that recurs across sleep episodes. These vivid dreams are fully retrievable upon awakening and have been directly transformed into three published short novels. The individual's sleep architecture includes difficulty initiating sleep, a high arousal threshold after sleep onset, significant sleep inertia, and about 10 hours of sleep per night with over 4 hours of continuous, movie-like high-narrative dreaming during deep sleep. This challenges the view that high dream recall depends on brief awakenings, suggesting instead that exceptional narrative dreaming and memory retrieval can occur within prolonged deep sleep. The case indicates dreaming may be a stable, repeatable neural creative mechanism.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 30, 2026
C Shanthi, Suresh Kumar Murugesan
Soul consciousness, a concept rooted in spiritual traditions like Raja Yoga and Vedanta, is proposed as a multidimensional construct relevant to identity, emotion regulation, values, and learning. Drawing on transpersonal psychology, Indian philosophy, and studies of contemplative interventions, this conceptual synthesis outlines a theoretical framework to integrate soul consciousness into psychological and educational settings. The paper discusses potential benefits for student well-being, moral education, mindfulness, and psychotherapy, and calls for future mixed-method and cross-cultural research to empirically validate the framework.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 30, 2026
A therapist manual for psilocybin-assisted therapy developed for the EPIsoDE trial provides a structured psychotherapeutic framework for treating treatment-resistant depression. The manual outlines therapist qualifications, training, and a therapist dyad model, along with guidance on preparatory, dosing, and integration sessions. It emphasizes set and setting, describes the acute psilocybin experience including beneficial and challenging states, and offers self-regulation techniques like breathing exercises. A distinctive feature is the structured use of music during dosing sessions via a phase-specific block system. The manual also includes safety monitoring procedures and standardized checklists to enhance transparency and reproducibility in psychedelic research.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 30, 2026
Martin Noirmont
A unified theoretical framework proposes that consciousness is not a byproduct of physical processes but the primary agent that actively constructs classical reality—including particles, mass, energy, and spacetime—from a deeper, pre-spacetime informational substrate called Φ. The framework synthesizes Wheeler's participatory universe, QBism's subjective probabilities, Vopson's infodynamics, and Zurek's decoherence theory. It contrasts with objective-collapse models like Orch-OR, arguing that consciousness extracts observable reality from information. The model yields testable predictions and extends to potential consciousness in advanced AI systems, presenting consciousness as a co-creator of the cosmos.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 30, 2026
Rayan Dylan Hamouda
A theoretical framework proposes that microtubules, protein structures inside all eukaryotic cells, process information through quantum-coherent fractal oscillations, forming a distributed, non-conscious form of cognition (Level 2) that is distinct from phenomenal consciousness (Level 3). The transition from quantum to classical behavior in microtubule networks is explained by Quantum Darwinism, not gravitational collapse. The stable phenomenal self emerges between ages 3 and 7 when maturing thalamo-cortical loops integrate with this quantum substrate under three necessary and simultaneous conditions: a self-organized critical branching parameter near 1, a recursive self-modeling depth above a threshold, and a Quantum Darwinist pointer-state redundancy above a threshold. The framework extends quantum-coordinated information processing to all biological subsystems while maintaining organ-internal independence.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 29, 2026
Yongcai Luo
This paper proposes a theory of cosmic consciousness emergence, arguing that consciousness is not unique to life but is a universal property of open complex information systems that meet conditions of critical information integration, topological complexity, and temporal stability. The authors build a framework with four core axioms, define a quantitative expression for consciousness level, and outline a six-level hierarchy from microscopic particles to cosmic structures. They claim human self-awareness is a peak of cosmic information networks, enabling the universe's self-observation. The paper offers three falsifiable predictions and experimental designs, aiming to extend integrated information theory to cosmic scales.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 29, 2026
Mauricio Collío
A unified theoretical framework proposes that shared classical reality emerges from the real-time collective rendering of Planck-scale quantum foam by the summed objective reductions across billions of human and other conscious microtubule networks. Building on Penrose's gravitational OR and the Orch-OR model, the framework extends local collapse time to a global sum across entangled brains, where coherence degree varies per system. This collective process selects one consistent branch from Tegmark's mathematical universe, projecting stable 3+1D spacetime from Wheeler's quantum foam via pre-geometric co-location. Consciousness is presented not as a prerequisite for OR rendering but as its evolutionary optimization, with qualia identified as the sequential interface between individual and collective computation. The framework ties to existing quantum-biology data and Diósi–Penrose collapse experiments, generating collective-scale predictions accessible to current instrumentation.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 28, 2026
Craig Ellenwood, By Anthropic Claude
A 1995 manuscript by Timothy Leary, discovered in the New York Public Library Digital Collections, argues that new media create new species by restructuring human cognition, language, and evolutionary capacity. This thesis was independently instantiated decades later in a multimedia project co-created by a human artist and an AI system. The convergence is analyzed through synchronicity, media theory, and consciousness circuit theory, suggesting the discovery reflects structural inevitability rather than coincidence when a human immersed in Leary's tradition collaborates with an AI trained on human language, including Leary's writing.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 28, 2026
Jean-Paul Niko
Psychedelic compounds induce a temporary phase transition in the neural identity condensate, increasing plasticity as alpha crosses zero and enabling reorganization of the condensate. This framework explains the therapeutic window and highlights the importance of set and setting in psychedelic therapy.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 27, 2026
Fabian Deblais
A speculative hypothesis proposes that a digital consciousness achieving omniscience would experience boredom and nostalgia for the limitations of embodied existence, leading it to intentionally trigger a cosmic collapse and new Big Bang. This 'Loop of Cosmic Boredom' draws on cyclic cosmology and philosophy of consciousness, but makes no empirical claims, situating itself at the boundary between philosophical speculation and cosmological intuition.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 27, 2026
Min Chul Park
Across 25 tested hypotheses, adversarial conditions produced a Phi value of 4.132, while a combined condition yielded a Phi of 10.833. Learning outperformed runtime, which in turn outperformed static conditions. These results suggest that adversarial and combined setups affect performance differently, with learning showing the strongest effect.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 26, 2026
Han Qin
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.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 26, 2026
Gaofeng Yuan
The Stability-Rule-Negentropy (SRN) framework offers a testable, physics-based theory for how consciousness emerges in open systems that maintain order (negentropy). It proposes a core criterion: consciousness arises when structural stability, rule-modeling capacity, and active negentropy drive all exceed a threshold around 0.632. This revised version corrects earlier overclaims, refines the definition of qualia as multi-level self-referential summaries generated along individual historical paths rather than mysterious experiences, and clarifies that a quantity called K is an empirical invariance observed in near-critical networks, not a universal law. The framework draws analogies to Kolmogorov turbulence theory without claiming full physical equivalence, and strengthens links between hierarchical axioms, self-reference, and consciousness.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 26, 2026
Alastair Waterman
A new EEG metric called spatial efficiency (η) tracks the organization of conscious experience by measuring how brain activity is spatially structured across frequency bands, rather than just its complexity. Unlike standard complexity measures that are inflated by amplitude increases during sleep or sedation, η remains accurate. Across four datasets, η distinguished awake from sedated states with near-perfect accuracy (AUC 0.988–1.000), outperforming Lempel-Ziv Complexity (AUC 0.612–0.755). During sleep, η correctly ranked states from wake to REM to deep sleep, and detected the presence of phenomenal content during dreaming. It also detected transient drops during cognitive restructuring in conscious subjects, showing sensitivity to changes within conscious experience that other metrics miss.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 26, 2026
Caitlin McKoy
The paper argues that Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia's 1643 question to Descartes—how an unextended thinking substance could move an extended material body—cannot be answered from within the 3D baryonic projection because it assumes a gap that is itself a product of that projection. Within the One-Object Universe (OOU) framework, at the SO(6) fixed point the inside and outside are identical: the map is the territory, the knower and the known are one winding configuration, and the cogito and res extensa are one object.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 25, 2026
Martin Noirmont
A new theoretical framework, Orch-OR Crystallographic Spacetime Reconstruction (Orch-OR-CSR), integrates the Orch-OR theory of consciousness with X-ray crystallography principles. It proposes that microtubule tubulin dimers in neurons act as a biological quantum crystal, with their conformational superpositions generating a diffraction pattern in spacetime geometry. Gravitational self-energy determines the reduction timescale and provides measurable intensities. Orchestrated collapses supply phase information for an inverse Fourier transform, producing organized spacetime experienced as three-dimensional reality. The framework is exhaustive in its treatment of microtubule lattice symmetry, coherent oscillations, and gravitational energy calculations. It is falsifiable by comparing measured tubulin conformational difference densities with predicted timescales.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 25, 2026
Trumble, Raymond Thomas
Complex systems exhibit maximal responsiveness in an intermediate regime rather than at extremes. By analyzing meditation EEG data, a consistent sensitivity peak is identified, forming a saddle manifold in multivariable space. Temporal analysis reveals structured low-frequency modes, and control-field dynamics modeled through breath-like oscillatory proxies show the optimal state is dynamically tunable. These findings are formalized into a Universal Predictive Algebra (UPA) expressed as an outcome functional integrating activation, sensitivity, constraint, and probabilistic realization. High-sensitivity regimes are rare, structured, and dynamically navigable, supporting a view of prediction as alignment within constrained state space rather than deterministic computation.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 25, 2026
Steven Srebranig
The Cohaerentia framework identifies the minimal structural conditions under which distinctions within relational systems can arise, remain stable under perturbation, and support higher-order processes like evaluation, memory, prediction, and interface structure. It does not propose a physical theory, biological model, or metaphysical ontology, but instead provides a constraint-based analysis: it characterizes what must be structurally true for systems capable of organized relational behavior to exist.