The space surrounding the body where physical interactions with external stimuli occur is referred to as peripersonal space (PPS). Traditionally conceived as a spatial construct, PPS is better understood as a neural representation that integrates bodily inputs with external cues to predict body-object interactions. After summarizing its multisensory, motor, and plastic properties, this review...
Meditation research is increasingly moving beyond mindfulness and other early-stage practices toward advanced meditation, encompassing states, stages, and endpoints that progressively unfold with increasing expertise through meditative development. This emerging subfield consists of interdisciplinary research that brings advanced meditation within reach of systematic scientific investigation....
How a scientific community is organized can affect whether disagreement drives progress or leads to isolation. Students and postdocs are uniquely placed to build communities that bridge theoretical and methodological divides. Drawing on a student-led society in consciousness science, we show how empowering early-career researchers can turn fragmentation into collaboration.
Noninvasive methods are making it possible to study neural replay in humans. Although focused on alignment with rodent findings, human research often tacitly assumes that replay is linked to conscious, deliberate thought. This assumption represents a missed opportunity to investigate the links between replay and consciousness, as well as cross-species differences more broadly.
Debates in consciousness science increasingly question whether computational functionalism is sufficient to explain conscious processing. We summarize three core features of the Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW) theory that highlight the multilevel architecture of conscious processing, extending from cellular and molecular mechanisms to large-scale network dynamics. On this interpretation, GNW is...
Rapid progress in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities has drawn fresh attention to the prospect of consciousness in AI. There is an urgent need for rigorous methods to assess AI systems for consciousness, but significant uncertainty about relevant issues in consciousness science. We present a method for assessing AI systems for consciousness that involves exploring what follows from...
Contemporary consciousness science faces an impasse: competing theoretical frameworks-structuralist versus functionalist, universal versus local, intrinsic versus extrinsic-appear to be inducing philosophical deadlocks and conceptual standstills. While these debates have generated valuable insights, they have proceeded in parallel, without a systematic framework for understanding their...
Computational functionalism claims that executing certain computations is sufficient for consciousness, regardless of the physical mechanisms implementing those computations. This view neglects a compelling alternative: that subcomputational biological mechanisms, which realize computational processes, are necessary for consciousness. By contrasting computational roles with their...
Progress in the scientific study of consciousness has been impeded by several fundamental controversies. One pertains to a major divide between theories: sensory versus cognitive. Here, we argue that the key to resolving this controversy is to reevaluate the conceptual distinction proposed by Block in 1995 between phenomenal consciousness (P) and access consciousness (A). We propose that P and...
Our understanding of the neural basis of consciousness is mostly restricted to large-scale brain activity patterns as measured by methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magneto/electro-encephalography (M/EEG). In contrast, we lack even basic understanding of circuit-level mechanisms supporting consciousness - particularly in humans - despite the fundamental role that...
Serotonergic psychedelics are being explored as treatments for a range of psychiatric conditions. Promising results in mood disorders indicate that their effects on emotional processing may play a central role in their therapeutic potential. However, mechanistic and clinical studies paint a complex picture of the impact of psychedelics on emotions and mood. Here, we review recent findings on...
Many hold that visual experience is sparse and its richness illusory, relying on high-level summaries rather than detailed content. However, we argue here that seeing is more than this - it is unfathomably rich. We distinguish three levels of visual phenomenology: high level object and scene categorizations; mid-level feature groupings; and a fundamental spatial field composed of spots and...
How will society respond to the idea that artificial intelligence (AI) could be conscious? Drawing on lessons from perceptions of animal consciousness, we highlight psychological, social, and economic factors that shape perceptions of AI consciousness. These insights can inform emerging debates about AI moral status, ethical treatment, and future policy.
Human subjectivity, our first-person conscious experience of the world, is among the deepest scientific mysteries. This opinion article lays out an approach to examining the neural correlates of subjectivity as it unfolds over time. Subjective experience is inherently idiosyncratic, arising from effortless interpretations that feel like perceived facts (p-interpretations), and integrative, with...
During wakefulness, our thoughts transition between different contents. However, there are moments that are seemingly devoid of reportable content, referred to as mind blanking (MB). It remains unclear what these blanks represent, highlighting the definitional and phenomenological ambiguities surrounding MB. We map out MB in terms of its reportable expressions, neurophysiology, and relationship...
Dreams have long captivated human curiosity, but empirical research in this area has faced significant methodological challenges. Recent interdisciplinary advances have now opened up new opportunities for studying dreams. This review synthesizes these advances into three methodological frameworks and describes how they overcome historical barriers in dream research. First, with observable...
Disputes between rival theories of consciousness have often centered on whether perceptual contents can be decoded from the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Failures to decode from the PFC are taken to challenge 'cognitive' theories of consciousness such as the global workspace theory and higher-order monitoring theories, and decoding successes have been taken to confirm these theories. However, PFC...
The quality space hypothesis about conscious experience proposes that conscious sensory states are experienced in relation to other possible sensory states. For instance, the colour red is experienced as being more like orange, and less like green or blue. Recent empirical findings suggest that subjective similarity space can be explained in terms of similarities in neural activation patterns....
Concepts of empathy, sympathy and compassion are often confused in a variety of literatures. This article proposes a pattern-theoretic approach to distinguishing compassion from empathy and sympathy. Drawing on psychology, Western philosophy, affective neuroscience, and contemplative science, we clarify the nature of compassion as a specific pattern of dynamically related factors that include...
The sense of agency, which refers to the subjective feeling of control, is an essential aspect of self-consciousness. We argue that distinguishing between the sensitivity and criterion of this feeling is important for discussing individual differences in the sense of agency and its connections with other cognitive functions.
Which systems/organisms are conscious? New tests for consciousness ('C-tests') are urgently needed. There is persisting uncertainty about when consciousness arises in human development, when it is lost due to neurological disorders and brain injury, and how it is distributed in nonhuman species. This need is amplified by recent and rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI), neural...
Many people report a form of internal language known as inner speech (IS). This review examines recent growth of research interest in the phenomenon, which has broadly supported a theoretical model in which IS is a functional language process that can confer benefits for cognition in a range of domains. A key insight to have emerged in recent years is that IS is an embodied experience...
Theory of mind research has traditionally focused on the ascription of mental states to a single individual. Here, we introduce a theory of collective mind: the ascription of a unified mental state to a group of agents with convergent experiences. Rather than differentiation between one's personal perspective and that of another agent, a theory of collective mind requires perspectival...
Contemplative practices are a staple of modern life and have historically been intertwined with morality. However, do these practices in fact improve our morality? The answer remains unclear because the science of contemplative practices has focused on unidimensional aspects of morality, which do not align with the type of interdependent moral functioning these practices aspire to cultivate....
Highlights The study of infant (and fetal) consciousness is emerging as a distinctive research focus in the science of consciousness. Converging evidence from studies of functional network connectivity, attention, multimodal integration, and cortical responses to global oddballs suggests that consciousness is likely to be in place in early infancy and may even occur before birth. Recent...