Consciousness remains incompletely explained at the anatomical, biophysical, and functional levels. Although existing theories characterize key functional correlates of conscious experience—including global broadcasting, information integration, attentional selection, working-memory-based awareness, and electromagnetic field dynamics—none has yet identified a specific cellular mechanism...
Ketamine responses vary across patients and sessions, suggesting that dose alone is an incomplete organizing principle. We propose a state-first Gate-Amplifier-Reintegration framework in which awake low-dose ketamine acts primarily as an Amplifier of transient network flexibility, whereas autonomic-salience stability is treated as a candidate Gate that may shape whether this flexibility remains...
Introduction: Affective disorders (ADs) are characterized by profound emotional processing deficits involving disrupted neural network activity and connectivity, particularly within the default mode network and fronto-temporal circuits, with abnormalities in theta and alpha oscillatory patterns. While current treatments primarily target mood symptoms, emotional processing impairments often...
Cognition, sentience, intelligence, awareness, and mind are often treated as distinct phenomena that emerge only at higher levels of biological organization, typically associated with nervous systems or human cognition. However, empirical research increasingly demonstrates learning, memory, adaptive behavior, and goal-directed regulation across a wide range of living systems, including single...
This article provides a novel functionalist account of embodiment in immersive virtual environments, grounded in a formal model of cognition, supported by past empirical evidence, and offering a testable framework for predicting when virtual experiences will produce cognitive and emotional effects. Our approach complements existing work on telepresence and subjective experience by applying the...
Psilocybin, a compound found in Psilocybe mushrooms, is emerging as a promising treatment for neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders, including major depressive disorder. Its potential therapeutic effects stem from promoting neuroprotection, neurogenesis, and neuroplasticity, key factors in brain health. Psilocybin could help combat mild neurodegeneration by increasing synaptic density and...
This article describes a biological neural network model that explains how humans learn to understand large language models and their meanings. This kind of learning typically occurs when a student learns from a teacher about events that they experience together. Multiple types of self-organizing brain processes are involved, including content-addressable memory; conscious visual perception;...
This study explores the layered coherence within human cognition as measured through EEG. Signals were collected from two groups (meditators vs. non-meditators) across six conditions: Meditation, Scrambled Words, Ambiguous Images, Math Mind, Sentences, and Video Watching. We analyzed the EEG data using Shannon Entropy, Pearson's Skewness, Total Power, and Dominant Frequency indices, now taken...
McFadden's conscious electromagnetic information (CEMI) field theory proposes that the human brain functions as a hybrid digital-EM field computer. The digital computations are implemented by the matter-based neuronal-synaptic network analogous to conventional digital computers operating Boolean-like logic gates nonconsciously and in parallel. Yet neuronal electrical firing and synaptic...
There is such a vast proliferation of scientific theories of consciousness that it is worrying some scholars. There are even competitions to test different theories, and the results are inconclusive. Consciousness research, far from converging toward a unifying framework, is becoming more discordant than ever, especially with respect to theoretical elements that do not have a clear...
The healthy conscious brain is thought to operate near a critical state, reflecting optimal information processing and high susceptibility to external stimuli. Conversely, deviations from the critical state are hypothesized to give rise to altered states of consciousness (ASC). Measures of criticality could therefore be an effective way of establishing the conscious state of an individual....
The scientific study of consciousness has seen a resurgence in the 21st century. This collection of reviews, essays, and theories on various aspects of comparative animal consciousness takes a biological and evolutionary approach. As defined here, consciousness refers to the process by which an animal has perceptual and affective experience or feelings, arising from the material substrate of a...
This article addresses the question of whether machine understanding requires consciousness. Some researchers in the field of machine understanding have argued that it is not necessary for computers to be conscious as long as they can match or exceed human performance in certain tasks. But despite the remarkable recent success of machine learning systems in areas such as natural language...
It is only in recent decades that subjective experience - or consciousness - has become a legitimate object of scientific inquiry. As such, it represents perhaps the greatest challenge facing neuroscience today. Subsumed within this challenge is the study of subjective experience in non-human animals: a particularly difficult endeavor that becomes even more so, as one crosses the great...
The modulatory effect of nasal respiration on integrative brain functions and hence consciousness has recently been unambiguously demonstrated. This effect is sustained by the olfactory epithelium mechanical sensitivity complemented by the existence of massive projections between the olfactory bulb and the prefrontal cortex. However, studies on slow nasal breathing (SNB) in the context of...
The cognitive capacities and behavioural repertoire of octopuses have led to speculation that these animals may possess consciousness. However, the nervous system of octopuses is radically different from those typically associated with conscious experience: rather than being centralised and profoundly integrated, the octopus nervous system is distributed into components with considerable...
Accounting for qualia in the natural world is a difficult business, and it is worth understanding why. A close examination of several theories of mind-Behaviorism, Identity Theory, Functionalism, and Integrated Information Theory-will be discussed, revealing shortcomings for these theories in explaining the contents of conscious experience: qualia. It will be argued that in order to overcome...
Understanding the neural bases of subjective experience remains one of the great challenges of the natural sciences. Higher-order theories of consciousness are typically defended by assessments of neural activity in higher cortical regions during perception, often with disregard to the nature of the neural computations that these regions execute. We have sought to refocus the problem toward...
This paper elaborates on a proposal for mapping a configuration space for selector circuits (SCs), defined as the subset of neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) responsible for evoking particular qualia, to its experiential counterpart, experience-space (E-space), as part of an investigation into the nature of conscious experience as it first emerged in evolution. The dimensionality of...
Synthetic biology and bioengineering provide the opportunity to create novel embodied cognitive systems (otherwise known as minds) in a very wide variety of chimeric architectures combining evolved and designed material and software. These advances are disrupting familiar concepts in the philosophy of mind, and require new ways of thinking about and comparing truly diverse intelligences, whose...
Our ability to understand the mind and its relation to the body is highly dependent on the way we define consciousness and the lens through which we study it. We argue that looking at conscious experience from an information-theory perspective can help obtain a unified and parsimonious account of the mind. Today's dominant models consider consciousness to be a specialized function of the brain...
Awareness or consciousness in the context of stimulus perception can directly be assessed in well controlled test situations with humans via the persons' reports about their subjective experiences with the stimuli. Since we have no direct access to subjective experiences in animals, their possible awareness or consciousness in stimulus perception tasks has often been inferred from behavior and...
This paper introduces a novel dual-aspect theory of consciousness that is based on the principle of holographic-duality in modern physics and explores the prospects of making philosophically significant empirical discoveries about the physical correlates of consciousness. The theory is motivated by an approach that identifies certain anti-physicalist problem intuitions associated with...
Continuous switching between internal and external modes in the brain appears important for generating models of the self and the world. However, how the brain transitions between these two modes remains unknown. We propose that a large synchronization fluctuation of brain networks, emerging only near criticality (i.e., a balanced state between order and disorder), spontaneously creates...