Whether consciousness arises entirely within the brain or involves processes beyond it has long been debated in scientific and philosophical circles. Historically, most academics have associated consciousness with neurons firing and communicating information; however, precisely how neural activity gives rise to subjective experience remains an open question.

Neuroscientist and consciousness researcher Christof Koch, a former faculty member at institutions including MIT and Caltech, challenges academics to take a closer look at what philosophers call the “hard problem” of consciousness: how the physical processes of the brain could produce subjective experiences in humans.

Earlier this year, Koch presented his arguments at the “Behind and Beyond the Brain” Symposium organized by the Bial Foundation, where he argued that the nature of consciousness, as well as phenomena like near-death experiences, may require a broader scientific framework.

Koch focused on three areas. First is the physical brain itself; second is the question of how we can truly agree on what is “real.” What does blue actually look like to you? What does pain feel like? These questions are difficult to answer scientifically as universal truths.

Third are unexplained experiences that may not fit neatly within a materialistic scientific framework, such as near-death experiences.

Revisiting an old approach 

Looking at older philosophical models might lead researchers toward new understandings or modern ways of approaching consciousness. Koch points to concepts such as idealism and panpsychism.

Idealism holds that consciousness or mind is fundamental to reality—mind comes first, matter second—while panpsychism holds that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe.

If mainstream science adopted such a shift, it could profoundly change how we understand ourselves. A paradigm shift of sorts may be coming for humanity, potentially through the integration of these ideas and a move away from strictly materialistic approaches to consciousness.

Koch points to these concepts as potential frameworks in which consciousness remains a fundamental aspect of reality. He also supports the controversial Integrated Information Theory (IIT), which proposes that systems possessing sufficiently integrated information may have some form of subjective experience.

Consciousness in Perspective

For additional perspectives, The Debrief reached out to Julia Mossbridge, a neuroscientist and Sr Distinguished Fellow in AI, Mind and Society at Florida Atlantic University, and co-author of Transcendent Mind: Rethinking the Science of Consciousness (2017), the first American Psychological Association textbook on consciousness to not assume consciousness is reducible to brain activity.

“To many neuroscientists, the brain is starting to seem more like a radio receiver and potentially also a transmitter of consciousness,” Mossbridge said in an email to The Debrief. “The idea that’s losing more ground with every new credible report of so-called ‘anomalous cognition’ is the old one—that the brain creates consciousness like the gallbladder creates bile. Maybe it’s more apt to compare the brain to the heart—it doesn’t create blood, it circulates it. But because you can use a machine to circulate the blood, it’s very clear the heart is important, but in modern times, not essential for circulation.”

Mossbridge points to reports of what she calls “veridical conscious observations” that occur when a patient’s brain shows little or no measurable activity to researchers, or what is described as “brain death,” as proof that consciousness may not be produced entirely by the brain.

These experiences led Mossbridge to consider the brain as a “transformer of consciousness rather than a creator of it.” She compares the relationship to a broken radio: “If you have a disruption in your brain, like a broken radio, you might have a disruption of consciousness.”

To test this hypothesis, Mossbridge says researchers could investigate whether people can perceive and later accurately recall “veridical information” while in deep sleep or under general anesthesia. Although she acknowledges that even positive findings might have another explanation, noting that they “could be explained by basic psychic functioning using some unknown physical mechanism.”

“So if that kind of experiment produces a positive result, and is replicated, you either have to argue that psychic ability is real but is something the brain does nonlocally (like maybe through entanglement) or that consciousness can wander from the body and observe things, or both,” Mossbridge concluded.

“The physical but nonlocal explanation is a bit like a heart pumping the blood, the brain guiding consciousness. The consciousness-wandering explanation is a bit like a heart being fully separated from the blood–and another method is used to circulate consciousness.”

“Either way, the standard model fails,” she added.

Taken together, Koch and Mossbridge’s perspectives point to a provocative possibility: that understanding consciousness may ultimately require science to reconsider some of its most fundamental assumptions about the relationship between mind, brain, and reality.

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and founder of VOCAB Communications. She hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on The Debrief’s YouTube Channel. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton and at chrissynewton.com.

Growing news coverage of UFOs is influencing people’s views about extraterrestrial life, particularly among younger Americans, according to a new survey. 

According to the survey’s findings, more than a third of respondents—and particularly younger adults—say recent reporting on unexplained aerial phenomena has strengthened their belief that aliens exist.

Connecting data from over 2,000 Americans, the survey found that 37% say recent news coverage about UFOs has increased their belief in extraterrestrial life (ET). Meanwhile, 54% say their views have not changed, and just 10% report that the coverage has made them less likely to believe in ET. The survey was conducted by Talker Research between July 1 and July 6, 2026. 

Gen Z Data 

According to the survey’s findings, more than half of Gen Z respondents—54%—said recent UAP news has increased their belief in ET. That figure drops to 45% among millennials, 36% among Gen X, and 23% among baby boomers.

These results arrive amid an increasingly mainstream conversation surrounding government hearings, military UAP reports, whistleblowers, broadcast and online news coverage, and podcasts. Such exposure may be helping shape how Gen Z views what is possible and whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the cosmos.

Looking at the results through a gender lens, 34% of men say UFO news coverage has made them more likely to accept that we are not alone in the universe, compared with 33% of women.

Media and Entertainment Culture Feedback Loops 

Historically, widely publicized UFO reports have helped shape the language and imagery Western society uses to describe unexplained aerial phenomena. One famous example occurred in 1947, when pilot and businessman Kenneth Arnold reported seeing unusual objects flying near Mount Rainier, an incident that received widespread media coverage.

The idea behind such a cultural feedback loop is relatively straightforward: someone sees something outside their normal understanding of reality and reports it. Media and entertainment then pick up the concept and expand upon it, creating their own interpretations of what extraterrestrial beings or UFOs might look like. Audiences absorb those representations, which may subsequently influence how some people perceive, remember, or describe their own unusual experiences. Those accounts can then return to popular culture, potentially reinforcing the cycle.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that what a person saw wasn’t anomalous. Instead, it suggests that media and entertainment may influence how people interpret or describe what they experience.

A 2025 paper in Evolutionary Human Sciences deconstructs a “two-way feedback loop between behavior and beliefs.” The framework suggests that existing beliefs influence behavior; people then observe that behavior, and the observed behavior influences what people believe others think/do. Finally, those beliefs influence subsequent behavior.

The new survey also considered the potential influence of popular culture. More than half of respondents (54%) believed alien movies and television make Americans more likely to believe in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life; 27% saw no connection between entertainment and belief, while 8% believed such programming actually makes people less likely to believe.

UFOs as a Belief System and Common Misconceptions 

An additional consideration when reading this survey is whether UFOs themselves should be characterized as a belief system. The subject is also an area of study examined by researchers from a range of disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, physics, anthropology, neuroscience, and others.

Many academics would argue that categorizing UFOs solely as a belief system risks pigeonholing the subject as a form of religion rather than recognizing it as an area of study. A belief system, by contrast, is a framework of ideas through which people interpret reality according to a particular set of assumptions or principles.

Jeffrey Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion at Rice University’s Department of Religion, addressed related questions in his March 2026 keynote, “Mind-Manifesting Shock: Comparing Psychedelic and Abduction Experiences, Religion and Psychedelics: Critical Cross-Cultural, Cross-Disciplinary Approaches,” at the Center for the Study of Religion at Ohio State University.

“We are often ‘believing backwards,’ taking comfort in someone else’s altered states, or in the present ‘explanations’ of this or that neuroscience or physics,” Kripal said at the time.

In other words, when people experience something anomalous and ask why it happened or what the experience might mean, they may immediately reach backward for an existing framework through which to interpret it.

In an email to The Debrief, Kripal adds, “I think the existing frameworks of religion and science ‘explain’ to people what happens, though they do not.”

The Debrief also reached out to Matthew Halsted, Associate Professor of Biblical Studies and Executive Team/Registrar at Eternity College, and asked how he would classify UAP—as an area of belief or a subject of study—and why.

“When it comes to ‘UAP,’ we have to see it as a two-sided coin,” Halsted told The Debrief. “On one side, we have the phenomenon itself (the actual sighting of the thing in the sky); on the other side of the coin, we have the public narrative (how we as people, and our respective governments, talk about reported sightings).”

Halsted adds, “The UAP topic (the ‘coin’) creates a lot of questions for the public, which inevitably gives rise to some sort of belief system. Some walk away believing it’s all nonsense, while others believe there’s something real about this whole thing.”

Halsted’s view, therefore, appears more nuanced than simply classifying UAP as a belief system: the topic can generate belief systems and competing interpretations around reported phenomena, but the subject itself extends beyond a simple question of belief versus nonbelief.

National Security Considerations

When asked how they would react if extraterrestrial life were definitively confirmed, 38% of Americans said their first response would be curiosity, more than twice the 17% who said they would be fearful. Men were also more likely than women to say they would be excited by such a discovery, at 20% compared with 11%.

Perhaps more strikingly, 60% of participants believed that governments know more about UFOs than they have disclosed to date.

The bigger question is whether participants believe society is prepared to accept confirmation that extraterrestrial life exists. Forty-five percent believe society would be prepared if governments confirmed the existence of alien life, while 55% say society would not be adequately prepared to comprehend the implications.

“It’s clear that the public—across age groups—is clamoring for greater UAP transparency,” said Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and current Chairman of the Board with the Disclosure Foundation, which also conducted a recent survey on the subject in June. According to Mellon, the survey found that “more than 84% of Americans want greater transparency, regardless of whether they consider themselves believers, skeptics, or unsure. And a recent Talker Research poll found that 54% of Gen Z say recent news stories have increased their belief in UAP.”

An era of misinformation and disinformation? 

The survey’s findings are compelling, but they leave another important factor largely unaddressed: not simply how information is perceived, but how easily misinformation and disinformation can proliferate in an era of online news, podcasts with inconsistent fact-checking standards, questionable or compromised sources, and clickbait headlines engineered to capture attention.

The issue, then, is not merely what a generation believes, but how people decide what is real and what is not. Within today’s fragmented information environment, audiences increasingly face the difficult task of distinguishing credible evidence from speculation, honest mistakes from misinformation, and legitimate reporting from deliberate deception.

None of this means that the broader UFO enigma can simply be dismissed. Rather, it underscores an additional challenge surrounding the subject: misleading or demonstrably false claims can now reach large audiences very quickly.

Addressing that problem will require better media literacy, stronger sourcing and fact-checking standards, and greater attention to the often-blurred distinction between evidence and interpretation. Ultimately, younger generations coming of age amid an unprecedented volume of digital information will have to navigate those distinctions for themselves. How successfully they learn to do so may have consequences extending far beyond what they believe about UFOs—shaping how they understand science, institutions, current events, and reality itself.

This is why it’s critically important that we understand UAP as accurately as possible. Whether information is being communicated between family members, friends, researchers, journalists, or policymakers, distinguishing established facts from interpretations and unverified claims gives people a better foundation for understanding the world around them and making informed decisions.

This survey suggests that UFOs are no longer confined to a subculture or counterculture; the topic has entered the mainstream. The question now is what that shift will mean for the future.

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

New research from Indiana University suggests that when your brain makes a decision, it may not actually “make” it in the way neuroscientists have traditionally assumed.

Conventionally, decision-making has been described as a sequence: you have options to consider, you choose one, and then you act. However, neuroscientist Tom James argues that this sequence may not accurately reflect what actually happens in the brain.

Traditional models suggest that the brain has centralized processes responsible for making decisions. James argues that what people experience as “decision-making” may instead arise from ongoing interactions among perception, movement, the body, and the environment. If correct, this perspective could significantly change how scientists understand human behavior.

The Sandwich Model Debated 

James describes one traditional approach to cognition as the “sandwich model”: sensory systems take in information, cognitive processes evaluate it and determine what to do, and motor systems then carry out the chosen action.

The problem, James argues, is that while scientists can identify many of the physical mechanisms involved in sensation and movement, it is much harder to locate a central point in the brain where a “decision” actually occurs.

Instead, James proposes thinking in terms of “action selection,” in which sensory, sensorimotor, and motor processes continually interact to produce behavior. But does that mean humans don’t actually make decisions?

“Of course they do. We use this language all the time, and it’s very helpful in terms of describing behavior,” James said in a statement. “The leap, I think, is to say that the brain works by having decision-making or control processes. It produces behavior that is well described in that way. But it doesn’t need a process that does that to make it look that way.”

In his view, “decision-making” may therefore be a useful way of describing human behavior rather than something the brain accomplishes through a specific, centralized process or system.

“As mental phenomena, they are defined on too abstract a level for the goals of cognitive neuroscience,” adds James.

Decisions are not “things”

Bridging neuroscience and philosophy, James draws on a physicalist framework associated with philosopher Daniel Dennett. Consider an object’s center of mass: it helps us describe and predict how the object behaves, but it isn’t a separate physical component causing the object to move.

James suggests decisions may work similarly. We can say someone “decided” to pick up a glass, but that does not necessarily mean there is a central location in the brain where that decision was made. Instead, the action could emerge from multiple brain and bodily processes working together.

As an analogy, James describes a robot programmed to follow a wall. Someone watching it might interpret its movements as a series of decisions, yet the robot does not require a centralized decision-making system. Instead, its sensors continually interact with its surroundings to guide its behavior.

James suggests that aspects of human behavior could be understood in much the same way.

A philosophical challenge 

James’s argument also addresses a longstanding philosophical problem. If the brain contains a central system that observes information and decides how we should act, what controls that controller?

This resembles what Dennett famously called the “Cartesian Theater”: the idea of an internal observer somehow watching and interpreting what happens inside the brain. But proposing such an observer only pushes the problem back another step—who, then, observes the observer?

Rather than placing a hypothetical decision-maker somewhere inside the brain, James argues that researchers should focus on the interacting physical systems that produce behavior.

That could mean studying cognition as something that emerges through the ongoing relationship between the brain, body, and environment, rather than as a sequence of isolated stages.

The feeling that “I made a decision” may remain perfectly real and useful as a description of human experience, even if there is no single place or process in the brain where that decision occurs. From James’s perspective, what we call a decision may instead be the outcome of interactions among the brain, body, and surrounding world.

This study can be found in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

The human brain is remarkably adept at juggling different kinds of information, allowing us to switch rapidly between tasks and adapt our behavior as circumstances change. A new study by MIT neuroscientists takes a closer look at how the brain accomplishes this, providing evidence for flexible neural modules that may help support this cognitive versatility.

Using mice, scientists found that a group of neurons in the prefrontal cortex could switch between retaining sensory information and maintaining an action plan in working memory.

“We found that the brain doesn’t dedicate a separate group of neurons for every type of information,” says Yuma Osako, an MIT postdoc and the lead author of the new study. “Instead, it uses the same populations of neurons to perform the same computation on different kinds of information, which means the same subset of neurons can hold both an action and a sensory stimulus in working memory,”

The findings also lend support to a longstanding theory known as compositionality—the idea that cognition can be constructed by combining and reusing neural components.

“One of the solutions that’s always been proposed has been this idea of compositionality — that you can take pieces of cognition that perform part of a task and reuse them in another task,” says Timothy Buschman, a professor at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and the senior author of the paper, in a statement. 

Another way to see this is to view it as “cognitive Legos,” Buschman suggests. Instead of building a new neural circuit when a new task starts, the brain reuses existing circuits and combines them in different ways.

The Test 

To see how this neural network operates, the scientists trained mice to compare two tones and respond depending on whether the sounds matched. As the mice performed the tasks, the scientists recorded electrical activity from thousands of neurons. 

“When mice do tasks that test whether memory computations can be reused, the answer is they are,” notes Mriganka Sur, the Newton Professor of Neuroscience at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. “There are subspaces of functional activity in the prefrontal cortex that can be the substrate of mixing and matching toward flexible cognition.”

Two important components of the task allowed the researchers to examine how different kinds of information were maintained. First, the mice had to remember the initial tone for a short period. They then had to retain their decision and form an action plan.

In the parietal cortex, neurons were dedicated to storing information about the tone. However, researchers found something different in the prefrontal cortex: a specific group of neurons could switch roles.

During one stage of the task, the circuit helped maintain a sensory memory. During another, the same population was involved in maintaining an action plan. This flexibility may help explain how a finite number of neurons can support an enormous range of behaviors.

“Our everyday life requires us to temporarily hold many different kinds of information. One big question is how the brain can represent an unlimited variability of information using only a finite number of neurons,” Osako says.

The researchers view these reusable neural circuits as potential building blocks for flexible cognition. More broadly, the findings suggest that the brain may be less like a machine filled with components dedicated to individual tasks and more like an interconnected system that continually repurposes its existing neural resources.

The recent study appeared in the journal Nature.

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

Scientists have uncovered new details about how the brain’s “information hub” responds to uncertainty, revealing a remarkably flexible system that rapidly changes how it communicates with other brain regions as we make decisions.

Every second of our lives, the human brain sorts through enormous amounts of information. From remembering a driving route and handling daily tasks to making decisions, the brain must continually determine what information matters and how to respond. Researchers at the University of Iowa wanted to better understand how the human brain manages and processes this information and found that it may be more flexible than previously thought.

At the center of this sorting process is an area of the brain known as the frontoparietal cortex. This region supports decision-making and behavioral control and can function as a kind of “information hub” for the brain.

The Study 

Using MRI scans, behavioral experiments, and computational modeling, researchers took a deeper look at how the frontoparietal cortex responds when people are uncertain about what they should do next.

“That’s the main contribution,” says Kai Hwang, associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and the study’s corresponding author, in a statement. 

“Our study shows in more detail how the frontoparietal cortex operates — what kind of information it extracts from other systems and how it uses its connectivity pattern to integrate information that is coming in from different areas of the brain,” Hwang adds. 

The research team recruited 38 participants between the ages of 18 and 35 and had each person learn associations between combinations of colors, faces, and scenes and particular actions—for example, pressing a button with the index or middle finger of either hand. The researchers then intentionally changed those associations.

When an action or rule changes, the brain has to determine what went wrong.

Did the situation change? Was the information unclear? Or did the person simply make a mistake? This uncertainty allowed researchers to observe how the brain’s “information hub” responds under different circumstances.

“It’s like where other areas of the brain don’t have all the information, so they send what they have to the frontoparietal cortex for guidance,” Hwang explains.

The results from the team’s research suggest the frontoparietal cortex does more than become more active when a task becomes difficult. Instead, the region changes how it communicates with other brain regions. This also depends on what information is needed at different decision-making stages. 

Hwang notes, “If they always get it right, they know they’ve made the correct association, but once they start doing it wrong, they will have to guess, ‘Oh, did the context change, or did I not see the color clearly?’ That creates uncertainty.” 

Your Brain Has an Air Traffic Controller

Hwang describes the brain’s “information hub” as a system that gathers information from different regions, determines what is relevant, and integrates those signals into a broader picture. One way to think of this function is as an air traffic controller, monitoring incoming information and adjusting communications as circumstances change.

“These are situations where people struggle with regulating their behavior. That, to me, is an integration problem. If that integration function is not working properly, then that could very likely mean they didn’t use the right context to regulate their behavior,” Hwang adds.

The study does not address how neurodiversity might affect this information-sorting process, although the findings could provide a foundation for researchers to investigate that question.

“It remains an open question how neurodiversity might affect frontoparietal integration. It is a very interesting question that, as far as I know, has not been studied directly, so I don’t have a definitive answer. One of our goals in conducting this study is to lay the foundation for future clinical investigations,” Hwang tells The Debrief in an email.

The findings suggest that the frontoparietal cortex can rapidly integrate and update information as circumstances change. Understanding this flexibility could eventually improve researchers’ understanding of neurological and psychiatric conditions involving behavioral regulation and decision-making. In particular, studying these communication patterns could help inform future investigations of conditions such as ADHD and schizophrenia, in which behavioral regulation and the use of contextual information can be impaired.

The new research was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.