Schizophrenia is a severe neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by positive, negative, cognitive, mood-related, and motor symptoms. Sub-chronic ketamine administration is widely used to induce schizophrenia-like behavioral and cognitive alterations in rodents. Chlorogenic acid (CGA) is an abundant dietary phenolic acid with reported anti-inflammatory, antioxidative, and neuroprotective...
Along the lines of neuronal global workspace theories, the paper hypothesizes that active neural signal regeneration in recurrent, re-entrant circuits could constitute an organizational basis for states of conscious awareness. In this view, brains are self-production systems that regenerate their own informational, signal states ("neural autopoiesis"). States of awareness themselves depend...
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) remains difficult to prevent after trauma, highlighting the need for early interventions that reduce the risk of chronic symptom development. This controlled study investigated the preventive potential of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) in a validated rat model of PTSD induced by predator scent stress (PSS). Adult male Sprague-Dawley rats (N = 175)...
Psychedelic MedicineJuly 24, 2026Matthew C. Company, Dylan J. Lifshitz, M. Farris Sawaya et al.
This narrative review traces how the scientific understanding of psychedelics has intersected with “reward processing” from before the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) era to the present, emphasizing how cultural and regulatory climates shaped what was viewed as an acceptable research question. Reward processing is treated as a family of partially overlapping phenomena: (1) reward-linked...
SUMMARY Psychedelics are powerful modulators of conscious perception, hypothesized to exert their effects by reorganizing large-scale brain functional connectivity. The circuit mechanisms underlying this reorganization remain unknown. Here, using widefield calcium imaging in awake mice, we found that the psychedelic DOI, in a 5-HT2A-dependent manner, acutely decreased the modularity of the...
Abstract Adult dentate gyrus neurogenesis and cell proliferation are regulated by multiple physiological inputs, including experience-dependent signals that have been linked to the DNA glycosylase NEIL3. Whether NEIL3 also gates psychedelic-induced proliferation is unknown. Here we tested the effect of a single dose of 5-methoxy-N, N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT), a serotonergic agonist with...
Understanding how conscious systems regulate behavior under changing internal and external conditions remains a central challenge in cognitive science. Existing theories have substantially advanced our understanding of information integration, global broadcasting, and predictive processing, yet they provide relatively limited mechanistic accounts of how previously acquired representations...
NeuropsychologiaJuly 23, 2026Andreea Zaman, Ruby Morton, Paige Seath et al.
Remembering personal events typically involves reconstructing our original first-person perspective, often accompanied by a vivid sense of re-experiencing the past. The Angular Gyrus (AnG) has been implicated in both perspective reconstruction and subjective memory experience, yet its specific contribution remains unclear. We investigated the role of the AnG across three studies using a...
In my thesis, I attempt, on the one hand, to classify some of the main problems in the philosophy of mind (such as intentionality, the mind–body problem, qualia, and the subjective experience of the world). On the other hand, I try to formulate a hypothesis concerning the naturalistic grounding of the human cognition and intelligence. The common thread in this investigation is the question of...
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), together with renewed speculation about artificial consciousness, have intensified debates concerning meaning and semantic intentionality in artificial systems. This paper advances a restricted and conditional thesis: even if LLMs were to possess some form of consciousness, this would not suffice to establish intrinsic semantic intentionality. To...