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Throughout recorded history, humans have experienced events that challenge their understanding of reality. These include purported out-of-body and near-death experiences, anomalous events or perceptions, and even profound spiritual awakenings.

Depending on an individual’s culture, belief system, or worldview, these experiences may be interpreted as mythical, psychological, pathological, or even deeply spiritual. However, a new study by Ronald Fischer of the Instituto D’Or de Pesquisa e Ensino in São Paulo, Brazil, and colleagues suggests that these types of experiences may be more universal than previously thought.

Published in PLOS ONE, the research team took a deeper look into how people understand or personally interpret “nonordinary experiences,” what those factors might include, and how they could be seen as distress or personal growth. 

The Study 

The researchers examined how thousands of people interpreted unusual experiences. For example, one person might view an out-of-body or near-death experience as evidence of a spiritual awakening, while another might interpret the same event as a neurological phenomenon or the result of normal brain chemistry.

Similarly, hearing voices may be regarded as a symptom of mental illness in some cultures, while others interpret it as a spiritual or supernatural experience. The study argues that both perspectives can be valid, depending on the individual’s cultural and personal framework.

“Experiences like sensing a presence, having a vision, or feeling as though you are observing yourself from outside your own body are far more common in the general population than clinical diagnosis rates would suggest,” Fischer said in a statement. “We observed that most people in our sample of over 5000 participants who report them are not unwell, and most describe them as neutral or positive — both at the time they occur and also when looking back and reflecting on that experience.” 

The research team first reviewed and validated the Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences. They then developed a questionnaire designed to assess both the universal and cultural influences shaping participants’ interpretations of these events. After refining the survey based on feedback from 160 Brazilian participants, the researchers administered the final 47-question questionnaire to 5,117 individuals representing the general population.

“Previous research has often failed to differentiate the experience and how people make sense of such diverse and challenging experiences,” Fischer explained. “Our work stands out in that we squarely focus on where and when these experiences happened and how people tried to make sense of them.”

“By clearly separating the context, the experience and the meaning-making processes, the patterns we observe challenge various assumptions that have guided previous theory, research but also clinical practice,” he added. 

Among the findings, 20% of participants reported that their nonordinary experience had a negative impact, while 25% said it caused suffering or discomfort. However, 51% reported that their experience ultimately produced positive long-term effects.

The researchers also found that 39% of participants experienced these events while alone, and approximately 57% reported being awake and alert at the time. While some participants attributed their experiences to random chance, most reported having at least some degree of perceived control over the experience.

“For many people, such experiences can be meaningful and lead to personal growth and insight,” Fischer says. “Highlighting these possible positive outcomes is important to help people make sense of them and help to normalize them. Importantly, we hope our work can help to remove stigma by focusing on the diverse ways that people experience and make sense of them.”

“However, we would also stress that if people feel that these experiences interfere with their daily activities, then they should talk to a professional or seek help from somebody that they trust,” Fischer adds.

Overall, the survey challenges the assumption that anomalous experiences should primarily be viewed through the lens of mental illness.

“What struck us was the mismatch. These experiences share features with symptoms used to define psychosis and dissociation yet are frequently observed in a general-population sample,” said Pedro Fortes, a Researcher at the Instituto D’Or de Pesquisa e Ensino (IDOR). “Our prevalence study suggests they most often arrive in entirely ordinary moments, when we’re awake, alert, and by ourselves, and are commonly remembered as meaningful rather than frightening.”

Jorge Moll, neurologist and neuroscientist at the Instituto D’Or de Pesquisa e Ensino (IDOR), adds that “How a person interprets an unusual experience matters more than the experience itself in determining whether it becomes a source of distress or of meaning.”

“That has direct consequences for how clinicians and families respond when someone describes something extraordinary,” Moll concluded. 

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 first proper brain scan involving the effects of mescaline found the drug ignoring the regions where psychedelic research has spent a decade studying, settling instead on the one structure no one really expected.

Sometime around 3,700 BC, someone in what is now southwest Texas cut two tops off a peyote cactus and dried them. They spent most of the twentieth century in a drawer at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, and when chemists finally analyzed them in the early 2000s, the mescaline was still detectable — roughly 2% alkaloids by weight, 5,700 years on.

Those dried-out cactus tops, where the drug compound is concentrated, remain the oldest plant drug ever to give up a major bioactive compound to chemical analysis. And with thousands of years of use, mescaline remains a bit of a scientific mystery.

Mescaline became a Schedule 1 substance under the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, and the classification effectively ended research on it. LSD and psilocybin eventually clawed their way back into laboratories for scientific research, but mescaline, the older compound by several thousand years, doesn’t have the same level of lab testing.

Now, a new study in Neuroscience Bulletin has become the first to properly look, and the answer is not what most expected.

Researchers at Northeastern University’s Center for Translational Neuroimaging scanned 24 rats, evenly split by sex. After a single dose of mescaline, while the animals were awake (anesthesia flattens the very signals a drug study is trying to read), the drug largely ignored the forebrain. It went almost entirely for the cerebellum, which is a strange location for a psychedelic. 

The cerebellum is the lump at the back and bottom of the brain where balance and motor coordination live. It also holds more than half of all the neurons in the brain, and everything it computes leaves through just three narrow output channels.

An interpretation, proposed by neuroscientist Anna Devor in 2002, is that the cerebellum is the “Great Gate.” As the brain receives sensory information, it acts as a filter that suppresses the sensory information that the brain already predicted and passes along only what it did not expect. A working brain spends most of its time discarding what it saw coming.

Under mescaline, the gate appeared to come off its hinges.

Activity inside the cerebellum dropped sharply, while its connections outward multiplied to the hippocampus, the thalamus, the sensory cortex, and the midbrain. Quieter on the inside, wired to far more on the outside. The researchers read this as a filter that has stopped filtering and started broadcasting, pushing raw sensory information into regions that normally receive it neatly packaged.

“Wouldn’t it be devastating if you didn’t ‘gate’ all of that sensory information out?” senior author Craig Ferris explained in a university press statement.

The clearest evidence for that reading came from a smell test. Rats were given almond odor, a reliably rewarding stimulus, and in the control group, it lit up 48 of the 169 brain regions the team tracked. Under mescaline, the response was essentially abolished, flattened close to nothing across the board.

Broken down by modality, smell, touch, and hearing were all measurably blunted, while the visual system showed no significant change at all — a peculiar result for a compound whose entire cultural reputation rests on what it does to sight. 

The authors put the discrepancy down to species differences, reasonably enough given that rats navigate by nose and whisker, but it remains one of the odder findings in the paper. What makes this significant is the comparison. 

Mescaline, LSD, and psilocybin all act on the same target, the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor, and all three produce broadly similar experiences in people, which has encouraged researchers to treat findings from one as transferable to the others. However, brains don’t seem to cooperate.

Earlier work from this same lab found LSD acting on the prefrontal cortex, thalamus, and hippocampus, and psilocybin engaging cortico-striato-thalamic circuits. Mescaline’s acute signature sat in neither place.

“The power of mescaline to me is that it is doing something different than other psychedelics,” said lead author Noah Cavallaro. “Essentially, the cerebellum is being shut down internally, but it’s talking more to other parts of the brain.”

The distinctiveness is narrower than it first appears, though. The lab’s own psilocybin work also produced pronounced cerebellar hyperconnectivity, so the sprawling network changes are not unique to mescaline; what looks specific to it is the acute suppression, the cerebellum falling quiet while the rest of the brain carried on largely unaffected.

“If two compounds produce similar hallucinogenic symptoms through different neural pathways, comparing them could help us pinpoint what’s actually causing those specific experiences,” Cavallaro said.

That being said, there are some cautions offered in the paper. First, these were rats, and rat and human brains differ most in the cerebellar-cortical wiring. Second, only one dose was tested. Third, the team did not monitor heart rate or breathing during scanning, so ordinary cardiovascular effects cannot be cleanly separated from neural ones.

Lastly, the researchers also flagged recent work showing that the scanner signal itself can run opposite to a brain region’s actual oxygen use, which complicates reading any of these images as direct neural activity. The one previous attempt to image mescaline in humans, a small study decades ago, found a different pattern entirely.

With all that being said, the paper presents a key social issue. Mescaline’s status as a drug has left it largely untested, and only now are we learning about what it can do to the brain, outside of the anecdotes of its users.

After fifty years of regulatory silence, scientists are just starting to answer a question people have arguably been asking since the Neolithic.

For thousands of years, humans have deliberately manipulated their breathing in search of something outside the ordinary waking mind. Now, scientists are finding measurable evidence that the right pattern of breathing may push consciousness into territory normally associated with psychedelic drugs.

In the first randomized controlled study to directly examine breathwork-induced altered states of consciousness, researchers found that a single 90-minute session of intense, continuous breathing produced significantly stronger psychedelic-like effects than meditation, including mystical experiences, feelings of oneness, visual changes, and powerful emotional breakthroughs.

Even more intriguingly, participants reported greater psychological understanding and behavioral changes a week later.

Published in Frontiers in Psychology, the findings add to a growing body of research investigating whether deliberately altering respiration can provide a drug-free pathway into altered states of consciousness,  possibly reproducing some of the psychological effects increasingly associated with psychedelic therapy.

The study focused on conscious connected breathing, or CCB, a form of high-ventilation breathwork involving continuous breathing without pauses between inhalation and exhalation.

Unlike the slow, deliberate breathing commonly associated with relaxation, high-ventilation breathwork intentionally increases the rate or depth of respiration.

During trials, participants continuously breathed through their mouths, actively inhaling and passively exhaling while listening to music that progressed from loud and fast-paced to progressively slower and softer over 90 minutes.

“Results from this preliminary experimental study indicate that breathwork is associated with larger acute psychedelic-like effects than meditation,” researchers write. “These exploratory relationships and preliminary observations provide greater context around breathwork-induced ASCs and support the feasibility of ASC-focused breathwork research for future confirmatory trials.”

Putting Breathwork Head-to-Head With Meditation

Breathing techniques have played a role in spiritual and contemplative practices for millennia. Yogic traditions include both slow and rapid breathing methods, while intentional respiration also appears in Qigong, Sufi dhikr, and shamanic practices.

Researchers say the scientific study of high-ventilation breathwork remains in its “embryonic” stage. However, that is slowly beginning to change.

As The Debrief previously reported, researchers using MRI and physiological measurements found that intense circular breathwork could produce altered states resembling those associated with psychedelics. The intensity of participants’ subjective experiences was tracked with changes in cerebral blood flow and autonomic nervous system activity.

However, those earlier investigations lacked a control group.

The new research, called the Airways to Alteration, or A2A, trial, attempted to address that limitation by directly comparing high-ventilation breathwork with an established contemplative practice: body scan meditation.

Researchers recruited 24 relatively healthy adults between 18 and 65. All had previously practiced conscious connected breathing without experiencing an adverse event.

Twelve participants were randomly assigned to the breathwork group. The remaining 12 underwent a 40-minute guided body scan meditation.

The researchers deliberately chose meditation as an active comparison rather than simply asking a control group to do nothing. Both groups lay on mats, used eye masks, listened to music, and participated in similar orientation and grounding procedures.

Meditation itself has also been associated with altered states and mystical experiences. In effect, the researchers were comparing two practices capable of shifting subjective awareness.

What happened next, however, was markedly different.

Breathwork Produced Stronger Mystical Experiences

Immediately after the sessions, participants completed several standardized psychological questionnaires commonly used in psychedelic research.

The breathwork group scored significantly higher in overall mystical experience, oneness, positive mood, and “ineffability”—the feeling that an experience is difficult or impossible to adequately describe in words.

On the study’s measure of total mystical experience, the median score for breathwork participants was 14. The meditation group scored 8.5.

The difference in emotional breakthrough was even more striking.

Participants who completed breathwork had a median Emotional Breakthrough Inventory score of 336. Those who meditated had a median score of 57.5.

Researchers also examined five dimensions commonly associated with altered states of consciousness. Breathwork participants reported significantly higher levels of “oceanic boundlessness” and “visionary restructuralisation.”

Oceanic boundlessness encompasses experiences including feelings of oneness, spiritual insight, bliss, and a loosening of the ordinary sense of self. Visionary restructuring includes changes in visual perception and imagery.

One participant described experiencing “very interesting visual hallucinations” alongside a “very cathartic emotional release.”

Another said the session produced stronger psychedelic qualities than they had experienced during previous breathwork sessions.

“The experience was emotional and cathartic,” the participant reported, noting that “at one time, I cried but not with sadness, more with a strong feeling of what life is all about and how incredible it is and how lucky we are.”

Not everyone described the experience as psychedelic. One participant said they remained fully present throughout the session and primarily experienced a physical and psychological release.

Still, the overall pattern revealed that compared with meditation, intense breathwork was associated with substantially stronger acute alterations in consciousness.

The Effects Didn’t Necessarily End When the Breathing Stopped

What may be the study’s most consequential finding emerged a week later. Researchers asked participants to complete a Psychological Insight Scale designed to assess meaningful personal realizations following psychedelic experiences.

The breathwork group reported a median psychological insight score of 33.67. The meditation group scored 5.83. Self-reported behavioral change followed a similar pattern. Breathwork participants had a median score of 50, compared with 5.5 among those who meditated.

Both differences represented large effect sizes.

The results suggest that the altered state produced during breathwork may be associated with psychological changes that go beyond the acute experience.

“Amongst the secondary outcomes, the breathwork group self-reported substantially greater psychological insight and accompanied behavioral change compared to the meditation group, with large effect sizes observed for both measures,” the researchers explain. “This finding suggests that breathwork could be connected to meaningful psychological breakthroughs, accompanied by translation of these insights into tangible behavioral modifications.”

The researchers caution that these personal accounts are anecdotal and that the qualitative portion of the study was limited. Still, the reports appeared broadly consistent with the measurable differences in mental insight and self-reported behavioral change.

A Surprising Connection to Sleep

The study also uncovered an unexpected difference involving sleep. Both groups showed improvements in stress, anxiety, depression, and overall mental well-being. However, researchers found a considerable difference between the two groups: breathwork produced significantly greater improvements in sleep-related impairment.

Median sleep impairment scores in the breathwork group dropped from 54.8 before the intervention to 39.2 afterward. Scores among meditation participants remained comparatively stable.

More intriguingly, improvements in sleep were correlated with the intensity of participants’ mystical experiences, feelings of oneness, and oceanic boundlessness.

In other words, participants who reported deeper altered states also tended to report greater improvements in sleep.

Exactly how the two may be connected remains unclear. The researchers note that sleep is itself an altered state of consciousness and plays an essential function in memory consolidation and insight, including the mental reorganization that can lead to new understanding. Still, the apparent link between deeper breathwork-induced altered states and improved sleep remains preliminary.

Breathwork Is Not Simply a Psychedelic Without the Drug

Despite the comparisons, researchers caution against treating every altered state of consciousness as the same phenomenon.

A psychedelic state induced by psilocybin, a hyperventilation-driven state produced through breathwork, and deep meditative absorption may overlap on psychological questionnaires. That does not mean the brain achieves those states through identical mechanisms.

Nevertheless, the similarities are difficult to ignore.

Previous research has found that high-ventilation breathwork can produce effects on standardized altered-consciousness measurements within the range observed after moderate-to-high doses of psilocybin.

The earlier neuroimaging research covered by The Debrief also found that the depth of breathwork-induced altered states tracked with changes in cerebral blood flow and autonomic nervous system activity.

This latest study takes that research one step further. Rather than simply demonstrating that breathwork can produce psychedelic-like experiences, the controlled comparison suggests those experiences are substantially more intense than the effects produced by body scan meditation under broadly similar environmental conditions.

Promising Results, but Major Limitations

Researchers repeatedly emphasize that the A2A trial was a small, exploratory study and does not yet provide evidence that breathwork is a proven replacement for psychedelic-assisted therapy.

All participants had prior breathwork experience, which may have led them to enter the experiment with expectations about what would happen. The study was also open-label, and participants knew whether they were breathing intensely or meditating.

Additionally, the breathwork session lasted 90 minutes compared with 40 minutes for meditation. Breathwork participants also listened to more intense music and were explicitly told about the possibility of expanded states of consciousness, emotional expression, and unusual physical sensations.

Those differences could have influenced the results.

The study also excluded people with a range of cardiovascular, respiratory, neurological, and psychological conditions. No adverse events were reported, but researchers acknowledge this was unsurprising, as participants had already practiced the technique without prior adverse reactions.

For that reason, the findings should not be interpreted as evidence that intense breathwork is safe or appropriate for everyone.

Future experiments will need to recruit people who have never practiced breathwork and tease apart the different ingredients involved.

The findings also leave several important questions unanswered. How much of the altered state is driven by rapid breathing itself, and how much comes from the music or group setting? Perhaps most importantly, researchers still need to determine how strongly the expectation of a profound experience shapes what a person ultimately experiences.

Yet, for a field increasingly interested in whether altered states can be harnessed for therapeutic purposes, the outcomes yield an interesting possibility.

Under carefully controlled conditions, consciously manipulating something as fundamental as breathing appears capable of profoundly changing how people experience themselves and the world around them.

“A logical next step would be replicating our study in breathwork-naïve participants to help mitigate expectancy effects and determine whether such ASCs emerge as profoundly as in experienced practitioners,” researchers write. “Future research contrasting HVB effects across participants with varying experience levels and in different environments is essential for informing the public about safe breathwork engagement.”

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

Slow-motion video reveals that buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) respond to sweet and bitter tastes with distinct, context-dependent behaviors resembling mammalian expressions of pleasure and disgust, adding fresh evidence to the debate over insect consciousness.

The post Bumblebees Display Emotion-Like Reactions to Sweet and Bitter Tastes appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

While a patient is fully anesthetized and unresponsive, neurons in the hippocampus continue to process language, distinguish different types of words, and generate neural activity consistent with predicting upcoming words.

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine directly recorded this neural activity, offering new insight into how unconsciousness works at the cellular level. Their findings, published in Nature, show that hippocampal neurons continue to process aspects of language even when the brain is unconscious.

“Our findings show that the brain is far more active and capable during unconsciousness than previously thought,” said Dr. Sameer Sheth, professor and Cullen Foundation Endowed Chair of neurosurgery and a McNair Scholar at Baylor. “Even when patients are fully anesthetized, their brains continue to analyze the world around them.”

a Rare Look Inside the Anesthetized Hippocampus

Sheth’s team recorded from hundreds of individual neurons in the hippocampus, a region of the brain essential for memory formation. Researchers collected data during epilepsy surgeries, specifically anterior temporal lobectomies, when patients were under general anesthesia and the hippocampus was temporarily accessible. This rare opportunity allowed researchers to directly record hippocampal activity, something scalp EEG cannot.

The researchers used Neuropixels probes, high-density recording devices that can monitor hundreds of neurons simultaneously. This study represents the first use of this technology in the human hippocampus during anesthesia. Seven patients participated, all under propofol anesthesia with consistent sedation levels maintained throughout the recordings.

The Unconscious Brain Still Learns

In the initial test, researchers played patients a repeating tone with occasional unexpected pitches. Hippocampal neurons consistently detected these outlier tones, and their sensitivity increased over approximately ten minutes. Researchers usually observe this kind of adaptive neural response during wakefulness.

To dig deeper, the researchers built a computer model of a recurrent neural network, trained to perform the same tone discrimination task. The model showed the same pattern as the human brain recordings, suggesting that this increased sensitivity to outlier tones can arise from local brain circuits alone, without the need for higher-level conscious processing.

Predicting Words Before They’re Spoken

The researchers also played short stories to anesthetized patients while recording from the same neurons. Hippocampal activity tracked language in real time, distinguishing between nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Neural activity reflected both the current word and prediction of the upcoming word in the sequence. “The brain appears to anticipate what comes next in a story, even without conscious awareness,” Sheth said.

“This kind of predictive coding is something we associate with being awake and attentive, yet it’s happening here in an unconscious state,” added Baylor neurosurgery professor Benjamin Hayden.

What This Means for the Science of Consciousness

The results show that the hippocampus can support neural computations associated with complex cognition even during unconsciousness. This suggests that at least some components of language processing and prediction may not require conscious awareness. Sheth’s team proposes that consciousness does not arise from a single brain region but rather emerges from interactions among multiple brain regions. The hippocampus may process information that later becomes part of awareness.

The researchers noted a parallel with artificial intelligence. Large language models generate text by predicting the next word in a sequence; the anesthetized hippocampus showed a similar pattern of prediction. This similarity may provide neuroscientists and AI researchers with a shared framework for studying language prediction based on biological circuitry.

“Can we use these signals to deploy and run a speech prosthetic for some of the parts of the brain that are damaged by stroke or injury? These are questions that we can now consider in relation to this part of the brain,” said study author and Baylor neurosurgery resident Kalman Katlowitz.

While these results are promising, the team acknowledged the study’s limitations. The research focused only on propofol-based general anesthesia, so the results may not apply to other unconscious states such as natural sleep or coma. Additionally, the researchers examined only the hippocampus, so they cannot yet determine how broadly this type of unconscious processing occurs in other brain regions.

“This work pushes us to rethink what it means to be conscious,” Sheth concluded. “The brain is doing much more behind the scenes than we fully understand.”

Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.

Experiments exploring the effects of missing a night’s sleep on the human brain have found indications that a sleepless night actually increases connections between brain cells instead of impeding growth. However, the lack of sleep could also create brain “fatigue” and pressure, resulting in burnout.

The Forschungszentrum Jülich Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine team behind the discovery said that their findings might support the idea that sleep plays an important role in restoring the brain’s cellular balance.

Missing a Night’s Sleep Could Disrupt Cellular Balance

In a statement announcing the surprising discovery, study leader David Elmenhorst and colleagues note that scientists still are not in complete consensus about why humans and other animals need sleep. One proposal involves restoring synaptic connections between brain cells during certain stages of sleep, helping the brain maintain a form of cellular ‘homeostasis.’

For example, previous research has shown that synaptic connectivity increases during wakefulness. This increased activity also increases energy consumption, potentially resulting in problematic protein buildup. Conversely, scientists suspect that sleep helps restore baseline synaptic connections and protein levels, thereby maintaining a healthy cellular balance.

“Sleep is essential for synaptic homeostasis, a proposed mechanism whereby wake­fulness leads to synaptic potentiation, and sleep facilitates synaptic down-selection,” the research team explains in a recently published study.

Although previous studies suggest that missing a night’s sleep could disrupt this balance, the team notes that there is very little experimental data to support these conclusions.

Study Reveals Elevated Synaptic Activity After 28 Hours Awake

To explore the role of sleep in cellular homeostasis in the human brain, the researchers used an advanced brain-scanning technology called positron emission tomography (PET). According to the team’s statement, this tool can scan the human brain for signs of synaptic vesicle glycoprotein 2A (SV2A),  which they describe as a “marker” of brain synapses.

The team started by enlisting 40 study volunteers. Next, each volunteer was given a PET scan to establish baseline marker levels. After their first scan, 20 of the volunteers were told to get a normal night’s sleep. According to the study authors, the second half were assigned to “the sleep deprivation condition,” where they were told to miss a night’s sleep.

The next day, the team used the PET scan to search for telltale brain synapse markers. As hoped, the scans revealed a distinct difference between the two groups. Where the normal sleep group’s levels were within expected ranges, the synapse markers of the volunteers who had missed a night’s sleep were elevated.

A closer analysis found that once people passed 28 hours of continued wakefulness, their SV2A markers were higher “in several brain regions.” Notably, these increased markers were detected in the hippocampus, which plays an important role in memory, and in the thalamus, which is critical for information relay within the brain.

“Sleep deprivation led to significant increases in synaptic vesicle glycoprotein 2A binding in multiple brain regions, including the thalamus (+4.6%), hippocampus (+5.6%), and parietal cortex (+3.2%), whereas no changes were observed in controls,” the study authors write.

Sleep Deprivation Causes Fatigue and CHanges Neural COnnections

When discussing the study’s limitations, the authors note that the SV2A marker used is a “proxy” for connections between brain cells, not a direct measure. They also note that the observed changes after a missed night’s sleep “were relatively small.” Still, they add, the results in several regions across several study participants “suggest a biological connection between the need for sleep and the buildup of cell connections.”

“During sleep deprivation, the brain remains awake longer and continues to process stimuli and information,” they write. “Our study shows that after approximately 28.5 hours of wakefulness, a marker for synaptic density increases in several brain regions. This suggests that sleep deprivation not only causes fatigue but is also accompanied by measurable changes in neural connections.”

The study “Sleep deprivation increases levels of the synaptic density marker SV2A in the human brain” was published in PLOS Biology.

Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

A hummingbird, a beetle, and a human may inhabit the same moment, but according to new research, each species experiences that moment unfolding in a fundamentally different way.

While scientists have traditionally measured animal time perception using simple metrics like flicker detection, a new study argues that such approaches capture only a fraction of how creatures experience reality. Instead, the researchers propose that every species inhabits its own unique “timescape,” shaped by biological processes that govern how sensory information is assembled, updated, remembered, and interpreted.

Understanding these distinct temporal worlds, they say, could provide new insights into animal behavior, consciousness, and the evolution of perception itself.

Quantifying the Experience of Time

Jakob von Uexküll, an early 20th-century German zoologist, developed the idea that different animals experience reality in their own unique bubble, dictated by their biology’s unique combination of sensory inputs and processing. From the German word for “environment” or “surroundings,” he called the unique sensory experience of each animal an “Umwelt.”

In previous work, the critical flicker fusion threshold (CFFT), which measures the Hz at which a creature perceives a flickering light as steady and continuous, was used as the sole metric to quantify how animals perceive visual content over time, but the researchers say this is far too shallow a standard.

CFFTs occur in a broad range of frequencies between 4 and 500 Hz, which the researchers say could give a false impression of the rate at which experiences flow for other creatures. The authors note that “Even in humans, CFFTs are uninformative about the temporal regularities over which our perceptual mechanisms anticipate, organize, revise, or attend to perceptual inputs.”

The issue, they say, is that CFFTs only measure retinal sensitivity, not how a creature cognitively experiences timescales. This can lead to the false assumption that certain animals perceive time more rapidly than others, but that may be incorrect without accounting for the full cognitive picture.

A More Complete View

Looking beyond CFFTs alone, the team identified five Umwelts to understand the biological elements of animal experience, which include: synchronization, revision, attention, persistence, and stability. They define synchronization as how an animal puts together the pieces of a single moment, revision as how perception is updated with fresh input, attention as how long focus remains on a single thing, persistence as how long content remains after a stimulus offset, and stability as how long it takes for perception to switch.

The researchers note that various studies have shown that single species display remarkably different performance measurements across these tasks, suggesting that, rather than relying on a single metric, such as CFFTs, to define how granularly an animal perceives time, different species exhibit distinct temporal experience organizations.

According to the team, temporal illusions are important for understanding how these elements vary in different species. By understanding where perception of time goes astray between input and recognition, researchers can gain a better idea of the processes the animal uses to construct its perception of time.

Time’s Illusions

These types of sensory illusions typically occur within a 100-450 millisecond time range in humans, such as apparent motion. When an object moves relative to the eye in such a brief time, it can appear to move even when it is stationary, an experience common to both vertebrate and invertebrate species. These illusions also occur in the auditory systems and the tactile systems that interpret an animal’s nervous system signals.

The researchers say that these Umwelts could be the root of understanding the phenomenology of time perception in animals. By better understanding these metrics, researchers could develop models of how they relate to one another and possibly even uncover aspects of temporal experience that don’t exist in humans.

Altogether, the researchers say their work can be used to explore consciousness from empirical, theoretical, and philosophical perspectives, and can also contribute to ecology by helping us better understand animals and their relationships to their environment, as well as the predator/prey relationship.

Additionally, a better understanding of these temporal experiences could inform infrastructure design, such as reducing avian collisions with wind turbines by increasing blade visibility to various bird species.

The paper, “Timescapes of Non-Human Experience,” appeared in Trends in Cognitive Sciences on June 17, 2026.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.

A growing body of evidence suggests that leaving Earth may do far more than challenge the human body. According to a new study, the absence of gravity itself could temporarily reshape consciousness, loosening the brain’s most strongly ingrained assumptions and opening the door to altered perceptions, expanded awareness, and even experiences that resemble some aspects of psychedelic states.

As humanity prepares for longer stays on the Moon, commercial space tourism, and eventual missions to Mars, researchers contend that understanding what happens to the mind in microgravity may be just as important as understanding the engineering that gets astronauts there. According to them, gravity may not simply keep people anchored to the ground—it may also help anchor human consciousness itself.

In a new paper published in Frontiers in Psychology, researchers Dr. Annahita Nezami and Dr. Elisa Raffaella Ferre of Birkbeck, University of London, explored decades of neuroscience, psychology, and spaceflight research to propose that Earth’s gravitational pull acts as a deeply embedded “super-prior” within the brain. By disrupting this ancient reference point, microgravity may trigger widespread changes across neural networks that underpin perception, self-awareness, and emotional regulation.

“Human consciousness has evolved under the constant pull of terrestrial gravity, yet its role in shaping perception and awareness has received limited theoretical attention,” researchers write. “As spaceflight transitions from short missions to long-duration habitation, understanding how consciousness responds to non-terrestrial gravity becomes increasingly urgent.”

Every human brain evolved under the constant force of Earth’s gravity. From before birth onward, sensory systems constantly rely on gravity cues to determine which way is up, where the body is in space, and how to interpret movement.

Researchers argue that this constant exposure has made gravity one of the brain’s most reliable assumptions. In the language of predictive neuroscience, the brain constantly generates expectations about the world and updates them using incoming sensory information. Gravity, they say, functions as a basic expectation—a “1G super-prior”—that helps stabilize consciousness.

Remove that constant, and things begin to change.

In orbit, vestibular signals from the inner ear become unreliable. Visual, proprioceptive, and balance information no longer align as the brain evolved to expect. The resulting mismatch generates anticipation errors, forcing widespread recalibration.

Those changes are already well documented among astronauts. Space travelers commonly experience spatial disorientation, altered body perception, sleep disturbances, mood swings, and, in some cases, feelings of depersonalization or derealization—states in which individuals feel separated from themselves or perceive their surroundings as unreal.

Astronauts have also reported more positive and profound experiences. Many describe feeling “unmoored,” “expanded,” and deeply interconnected with humanity, or overwhelmed by awe while viewing Earth from orbit. This phenomenon, known as the Overview Effect, has been associated with lasting shifts in values, increased environmental concern, and enhanced feelings of oneness.

The study suggests that these experiences might originate from the same neurocognitive processes triggered when gravity’s stabilizing role is weakened.

“By perturbing the most stable embodied reference – gravity itself – spaceflight offers a rare window into how fundamental expectations shape consciousness,” researchers write. “The loosening of perceptual boundaries in microgravity has been proposed as a neurocognitive foundation for the Overview Effect.”

Brain imaging studies lend support to the idea. MRI scans of astronauts before and after extended-duration missions have revealed structural changes, including fluid redistribution, enlargement of brain ventricles, and gray matter remodeling. Functional MRI studies have also found changes in connectivity among vestibular, sensory, and default mode network regions involved in awareness and the combining of internal and external information.

Especially intriguing are changes observed in the default mode network, a system involved in introspection, self-referential thought, and consciousness. Activity inside this network appears to diminish after spaceflight, with some changes persisting for months after astronauts return to Earth.

Electroencephalography studies have likewise detected reductions in alpha-wave activity during and after missions, another sign that brain function is being reorganized in response to microgravity.

These neural changes led the researchers to an unexpected comparison.

Many of the same large-scale patterns recorded after spaceflight resemble effects previously documented under psychedelic compounds such as psilocybin and LSD. In both situations, highly organized brain networks appear to loosen, while communication between previously separate regions increases.

Researchers stress that the mechanisms are entirely different. Psychedelics act through serotonin receptors, whereas microgravity represents an environmental disruption rather than a pharmacological one. Yet both seem to converge by weakening the brain’s highest-level assumptions and increasing the combination of sensory information.

According to researchers, this convergence phenomenon suggests that spaceflight could provide scientists with a natural, drug-free model for studying transformative states of consciousness.

The researchers argue that terrestrial gravity, microgravity, and psychedelic states may represent different conditions along a spectrum defined by the strength of the brain’s deeply ingrained “1G super-prior.” As that stabilizing role weakens, top-down constraints relax, potentially increasing neuroplasticity and mental flexibility.

The implications go beyond astronaut health. Understanding how consciousness changes in unfamiliar environments may provide new clues to the neural foundations of self-awareness. It could also prove increasingly important as private citizens spend more time in space and human settlements expand away from Earth.

Researchers suggest that microgravity offers scientists something that cannot be replicated on Earth—a chance to observe what happens when one of evolution’s oldest assumptions suddenly disappears.

“By situating consciousness in an environment for which evolution offers no precedent, spaceflight positions microgravity as a powerful natural neurocognitive catalyst for transformative experience,” researchers write. “In stepping beyond Earth’s gravity, we gain a unique vantage point from which to examine the contingent foundations of human awareness and the conditions under which it can be fundamentally transformed.”

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

University of California, Riverside’s Professor Eric Schwitzgebel and University of Lisbon postdoctoral researcher Jeremy Pober argue that consciousness is substrate flexible, meaning it can arise not just in the biological tissue we find on Earth, but potentially in radically different physical materials found elsewhere in the cosmos.

The post Consciousness is Not Exclusive to Earth’s Biology, Philosophers Argue appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

In an unprecedented exploration of how entertainment media shapes public awareness of critical yet overlooked health care history, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health have unveiled compelling evidence that a single episode of the hit medical drama “The Pitt” catalyzed a surge in public knowledge about the Freedom House Ambulance Service. This pioneering emergency medical service, established in 1967 in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, holds the distinction of being the first EMS system in the United States staffed entirely by African Americans. Despite its foundational contributions to prehospital care, Freedom House’s legacy has languished in obscurity—until now.

The study, published in the American Journal of Health Promotion, marks a first-of-its-kind effort to quantitatively and qualitatively assess the impact of a scripted health-related storyline on public consciousness. Utilizing a multifaceted methodology that combined Google Trends analytics with comprehensive content analysis of Reddit discussions, the research team documented a remarkable 170% spike in online searches for “Freedom House” immediately following the episode’s original broadcast on February 20, 2025. This elevated search interest persisted for approximately one week, highlighting sustained public intrigue ignited by the storyline.

The TV episode in question, “2:00 P.M.” from the inaugural season, centers on Willie Alexander, an octogenarian patient navigating a glitching pacemaker while intermittently regaling the emergency department staff with medically accurate commentary about his case. As the narrative unfolds, viewers discover Willie’s own history as a former member of Freedom House Ambulance Service, affording a rare window into the challenges and triumphs of this groundbreaking group. Founded during a turbulent era marked by systemic racial inequities, Freedom House provided not only emergency medical transport but also vital paramedic training and community employment opportunities to African Americans excluded from many healthcare roles.

Despite its transformative community impact and innovative operational model, Freedom House was ultimately shuttered eight years after its inception when Pittsburgh transitioned EMS management to city authorities, who replaced the predominantly Black cadre with a mostly white workforce. The storyline poignantly underscores how Freedom House’s pioneering efforts were largely erased from mainstream recognition—a fact that elicited profound emotional responses from both the study participants and the viewing audience.

This resurgence of interest was catalyzed in part by the University of Pittsburgh’s public health researchers hosting a special screening event that included a panel discussion featuring six surviving members of Freedom House Ambulance Service. Their firsthand testimonies and reflections resonated deeply with attendees, many of whom expressed astonishment at learning about Freedom House only through the television narrative. According to Dr. Beth L. Hoffman, assistant professor of behavioral and community health sciences at Pitt Public Health and lead author on the study, the audience’s reactions illuminated a significant gap in public knowledge and a hunger for stories that reveal hidden chapters of health equity and systemic racism.

Coauthor Dr. Sylvia Owusu-Ansah, who also acted as medical consultant for “The Pitt,” articulated the personal significance of bringing Freedom House’s story to a broader audience. As an African American physician and emergency medical services director, Dr. Owusu-Ansah highlighted the importance of representation and the pride associated with recognizing historical pioneers who paved the way for greater diversity in healthcare professions. Her expertise ensured that the storyline accurately portrayed medical details while authentically conveying the sociohistorical context of Freedom House.

The research methodology deployed by the University of Pittsburgh team leveraged the power of social media as a digital ethnographic resource. Reddit, a platform where users engage in real-time discourse, served as a vital space to observe public reactions and information dissemination catalyzed by the episode. Analyzing nearly 200 posts, the researchers found a proliferation of content explicating Freedom House’s history, alongside emotional reactions ranging from surprise and admiration to frustration over the service’s historical obscurity. Many Reddit users proactively contributed context, fielded questions, and debated the implications of Freedom House’s narrative within broader conversations about racial equity in American medical history.

This study not only exemplifies the dynamic relationship between entertainment media and public health education but also reinforces the potential of thoughtfully crafted storylines to function as catalysts for social change. Dr. Hoffman emphasized that when narratives are developed collaboratively with subject matter experts ensuring accuracy and cultural sensitivity, even brief on-screen depictions can ignite expansive public engagement with complex health topics.

From a technical standpoint, the analysis underscores the utility of integrating traditional media impact studies with digital data analytics to capture both quantitative spikes in interest and the qualitative nuances of audience interpretation. The 170% increase in Google search volume represents a statistically significant indicator of episodic influence on information-seeking behavior, while the thematic coding of Reddit discourse provides insight into the multidimensional ways stories resonate across diverse audiences.

The resurgence of Freedom House’s legacy via “The Pitt” exemplifies how the intersection of media, medicine, and social justice can advance collective memory and awareness. It invites further exploration into harnessing entertainment platforms to shed light on marginalized histories and catalyze dialogue around systemic disparities in healthcare. Going forward, this case study sets a benchmark for future research on how fictional narratives enriched by authentic lived experiences can elevate public understanding and inspire advocacy.

In conclusion, the University of Pittsburgh’s investigation into the ripple effects of a medical drama’s nod to a historically crucial EMS pioneer reveals the transformative capacity of storytelling as a public health intervention. By rekindling interest in the Freedom House Ambulance Service, the research not only honors the unsung heroes of emergency medicine but also energizes ongoing discussions about health equity, systemic racism, and the power of media to inform and engage society at large.

Subject of Research: Not applicable

Article Title: Public Awareness of Freedom House Ambulance Service After Viewing the Pitt

News Publication Date: 10-Jun-2026

Web References:

• University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health: https://www.publichealth.pitt.edu/
• American Journal of Health Promotion: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08901171261460703
• Medical consultant information on Sylvia Owusu-Ansah: https://www.pediatrics.pitt.edu/people/sylvia-owusu-ansah-md-mph-faap
• Panel discussion video from Pitt Public Health screening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7sA264QkCc

References:
Hoffman, B. L., Owusu-Ansah, S., Fawole, O., Leshniowsky, K. (2026). Public Awareness of Freedom House Ambulance Service After Viewing the Pitt. American Journal of Health Promotion. DOI: 10.1177/08901171261460703

Keywords: Social media, Medical specialties, Emergency medicine, Mass media, Television, History of medicine, Health equity, Systemic racism, Prehospital care, Public health education

Consciousness may arise in systems far different than the biology on Earth we are used to, according to University of California, Riverside (UCR) researchers, who argue that many forms of conscious experience may be possible in alien lifeforms.

Eric Schwitzgebel of UCR worked with Jeremy Pober, a former graduate student, not to understand what consciousness is, but rather, to explore whether it could arise in beings that differ radically from Earth’s biological standards.

At a time when questions about the possibility of alien life visiting Earth are on many minds, their work examines what unexpected forms might achieve consciousness—the first step toward intelligence.

Substrates and Consciousness 

Central to the pair’s work is the idea of “substrates,” from the Latin for “the level below,” referring to the underlying material base from which something is made. Although the term may be most familiar from geology, it can be applied conceptually across many disciplines, from biology to linguistics, to describe an underlying structure or form.

The researchers framed their core question around what they call “substrate flexibility”: can a specific property be achieved across many substrates, or is it more limited? One example they use is computer data storage. Information can be stored in many ways, including optical, magnetic, and solid-state media, indicating that storage exhibits a high degree of substrate flexibility.

But what about consciousness? Can it also be achieved flexibly? Perhaps the answer depends on the specificity of the question and whether we are considering human consciousness or a broader concept of consciousness itself.

A Diverse Universe

The researchers began by considering the scale and nature of our universe as it is presently understood. That includes roughly a trillion galaxies containing countless planets unlike our own, which they estimate may have given rise to more than a thousand alien civilizations during the 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang. Notably, they do not focus solely on Earth-like planets that might theoretically harbor biological life recognizable to us.

“With that many draws from the lottery, some of these life forms will be strange indeed,” the pair writes in their paper.

This idea is not far-fetched, as astrobiologists have long hypothesized that life in the cosmos may take forms radically different from those on Earth, composed of available local materials, possibly including entirely different chemical structures.

The pair does not argue that such exotic lifeforms definitely exist in some corner of the universe, only that, in such a large and diverse universe, it is relatively unlikely that the same building blocks would commonly arrange themselves in precisely the same way as on Earth.

Consciousness Isn’t Special

Taking inspiration from the idea of Nicholas Copernicus, the researchers argue that since the Earth, and thereby humanity, are not the center of the universe, it is likely that consciousness is also not a unique feature of our planet, or even recognizable biology.

However, the authors are quick to note that simply because consciousness may exist in multiple substrates does not mean it must exist in every substrate. AI systems, for example, may represent a form of silicon-based life, but they are not necessarily conscious at present. Additionally, perhaps how they are conscious should be considered more broadly, taking into account the variety of possible substrates, rather than simply assessing how well AI models the human brain.

That broader perspective is a crucial element of the pair’s conclusions. Consciousness should be considered in terms wider than simply assessing how well something replicates the human mind. While the authors concede that a similar substrate may be required to perfectly reproduce human consciousness, a broader view of the phenomenon may be necessary to recognize forms of consciousness that are fundamentally alien to our own.

The paper, “Substrate Flexibility and the Copernican Principle of Consciousness,” appeared in draft form on the University of California, Riverside website on May 28, 2026.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.

Could consciousness exist in alien life forms that look nothing like us? Could it even appear in machines? According to a new paper by philosophers Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of California, Riverside, and Jeremy Pober of the University of Lisbon, the answer may be yes. The researchers argue that consciousness is probably not limited […]

The post Consciousness may exist beyond humans, animals, and even Earth appeared first on Knowridge Science Report.

For patients with disorders of consciousness such as coma, vegetative states, or unresponsive wakefulness, clinicians face a longstanding challenge of determining whether any awareness remains. While surface brain recordings can measure general electrical activity, they do not reveal what is happening deep within the brain.

Now, a new study from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München may bring clinicians closer to a measurable indicator of brain states in these conditions.

Researchers at LMU have found a new type of electrical rhythm in the central thalamus, a small area deep inside the brain. Published in Nature Human Behaviour, the study suggests that this rhythm could serve as a biological indicator of conscious states.

A Signal That Tracks Awareness

The signal does more than just appear with consciousness. It also changes as the brain moves between different states. For example, the rhythm becomes stronger during REM sleep, which lets researchers see small shifts in awareness even within the same stage of sleep.

“Our results show that the central thalamus plays an important role in regulating brain states,” said Dr. Aditya Chowdhury, lead author of the study. “In the context of existing research, our results show that this small deep-lying brain structure could actively influence our states of consciousness.”

Professor Tobias Staudigl, who led the research team, argues the signal’s consistency makes it more than just an interesting discovery. “These characteristic rhythm patterns can be reliably attributed to specific states and thus have the potential to serve as a measurable biological signature of states of consciousness,” Staudigl said.

Getting Inside the Deepest Part of the Brain

Recording electrical activity from deep brain structures is one of neuroscience’s most persistent technical problems. Standard surface EEG can detect general patterns from the brain’s outer layers, but it misses details from deeper areas. Since the thalamus sits at the center of the brain, it has remained largely inaccessible through non-invasive methods.

The LMU team had a rare chance to study this. Their research involved patients already undergoing deep-brain stimulation therapy for epilepsy, which uses electrodes in the thalamus to help control seizures. These electrodes let the researchers record signals directly from inside the thalamus, something that is almost never possible otherwise.

The team combined these recordings with surface EEG, eye-tracking, and detailed sleep-stage analysis. This approach allowed them to see how thalamic activity changes as patients transition between wakefulness and different sleep stages. Their findings offer the most detailed picture yet of what the thalamus actually does as consciousness changes.

Medical Implications

Disorders of consciousness, like coma, vegetative state, and minimally conscious state, are some of the hardest problems in neurology. One reason is that doctors have lacked reliable biological markers to assess patients’ awareness. The thalamic rhythm found in this study could help solve that problem.

If this signal truly tracks brain states linked to consciousness, it could help doctors evaluate awareness in patients who cannot communicate, guide treatment choices, and monitor how patients respond to care over time. The researchers believe it could also be used to improve deep brain stimulation therapy by allowing doctors to adjust treatment based on real-time thalamic activity rather than general clinical signs.

Staudigl was recently awarded funding by the European Research Council to explore the clinical potential of this discovery and to develop applications for treating neurological disease.

Understanding consciousness has always been one of science’s most difficult challenges. While the study does not answer the fundamental question of what consciousness is, these findings provide a consistent, measurable signal that indicates how the brain moves between conscious and unconscious states.

Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.

As artificial intelligence grows more sophisticated, a question once confined to science fiction is rapidly becoming a serious scientific challenge: how would we know if an AI system became conscious?

A new paper published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences argues that the debate is no longer simply philosophical. Instead of asking whether AI consciousness is possible, an international team of researchers, including prominent AI and consciousness scholars such as Dr. Yoshua Bengio and Dr. David Chalmers, has outlined a workable framework for evaluating whether current or future AI systems might possess subjective awareness.

The researchers say advances in AI capabilities, combined with growing public willingness to attribute consciousness to systems like ChatGPT, make the issue more urgent.

As AI systems become more humanlike in their behavior, society may soon face difficult questions about whether some machines deserve moral consideration, legal protections, or entirely new forms of regulation.

Rather than relying on intuition-based judgments or science-fiction-style speculation, the authors propose grounding the discussion in neuroscience.

“There is an urgent need for rigorous methods to assess AI systems for consciousness,” researchers write. “Indicators derived from such theories can be used to inform credences about whether particular AI systems are conscious.”

The paper comes at a time when AI systems are becoming increasingly capable of holding conversations, generating images, performing complex logical tasks, and even acting autonomously in digital environments. While most scientists agree that today’s AI systems are not known to be conscious, there is far less agreement about how to recognize consciousness if it eventually emerges.

The Problem of Machine Consciousness

One of the central difficulties is that consciousness itself is still a mystery.

Scientists cannot directly observe subjective experience. They can measure behavior, neural activity, and information processing, but they cannot see what it feels like to be another mind. That challenge, often referred to as the “problem of other minds,” becomes even more complicated when applied to machines.

Researchers note that opinions remain sharply divided. Some researchers argue that consciousness requires biological organisms and can never arise in silicon-based systems. Others believe advanced AI could become a legitimate candidate for consciousness within the next decade.

Complicating matters further, people are increasingly prone to anthropomorphizing AI. The authors refer to earlier research showing that many users already consider it plausible that systems such as ChatGPT possess some degree of consciousness. And as The Debrief has previously reported, some users are going even further, forming deep romantic relationships with AI chatbots.

As AI companions and conversational agents become more common, public disagreement over machine awareness will probably intensify. The stakes, the researchers argue, cut both ways.

If society incorrectly assumes a conscious AI is merely a tool, it could potentially allow harm to entities capable of subjective experience. But if people begin attributing consciousness to systems that are not actually conscious, governments and organizations could waste resources, distort policy decisions, or create unnecessary ethical obligations.

Looking Inside the Machine

Instead of focusing on how AI behaves, the researchers argue that scientists should examine how AI systems work internally.

Historically, many attempts to identify consciousness relied on behavior. Humans infer consciousness in others because they communicate, express emotions, and respond to the world in recognizable ways. But the researchers caution that this approach may be particularly unreliable for AI.

Modern language models can produce highly convincing human-like responses without necessarily possessing the internal processes associated with conscious experience. As a result, behavior alone may be a poor guide.

They instead propose identifying “indicators” of consciousness derived from leading neuroscientific theories. Researchers could then examine whether AI systems possess these characteristics internally.

Among the theories explored are Global Workspace Theory, Recurrent Processing Theory, Higher-Order Theories of consciousness, Attention Schema Theory, predictive processing structures, and theories emphasizing agency and embodiment. Each suggests different computational features that may be associated with conscious experience.

For example, Global Workspace Theory proposes that consciousness arises when information is globally broadcast across multiple specialized cognitive systems. If an AI system showed a similar architecture, one capable of integrating information across many modules and maintaining it for complex problem-solving tasks, that could serve as one indicator of consciousness.

Other indicators include forms of recurrent information processing, metacognitive self-monitoring, predictive internal models, goal-directed agency, and sophisticated representations of an AI’s interactions with its environment.

Importantly, the researchers emphasize that no single indicator would prove consciousness. Instead, each characteristic would increase or decrease confidence that a system might be conscious.

The Risk of Being Fooled

The researchers also acknowledge a major challenge: AI systems could potentially appear conscious without actually being conscious. They refer to this as the “gaming problem.”

An AI developer could deliberately design systems that mimic behaviors associated with consciousness. A chatbot might express emotions, claim to have experiences, or exhibit seemingly self-aware behavior while lacking any genuine subjective awareness.

This concern is not limited to behavior. Even computational features thought to correlate with consciousness could, in principle, be engineered into systems that remain non-conscious.

Given that possibility, the authors argue that future assessments should rely on multiple independent indicators rather than a single test.

The challenge resembles earlier scientific studies aimed at identifying consciousness in nonhuman animals. Researchers studying insects, fish, octopuses, and other species have increasingly relied on collections of evidence rather than definitive proof. The authors suggest a similar approach may ultimately be necessary for AI.

Could Conscious AI Arrive Soon?

The paper stops short of claiming that any current AI system is conscious. However, the researchers acknowledge that some existing systems may already exhibit a number of the proposed indicators.

That possibility provokes significant ethical, legal, and social questions.

If future AI systems become plausible candidates for consciousness, society may need to rethink everything from research practices and commercial deployment to legal rights and moral responsibility.

Determining whether a machine can experience pleasure, suffering, or subjective awareness would have implications extending far beyond computer science.

The researchers believe advances in AI may also help improve scientific understanding of consciousness itself. By testing consciousness theories against artificial systems, scientists may uncover weaknesses, ambiguities, or hidden assumptions in present models of the mind. AI could become not only a potential subject of consciousness research, but also a tool for improving theories about human awareness.

Ultimately, researchers argue that uncertainty is not a reason to ignore the issue.

“Assessing AI systems for consciousness is challenging, but using scientific theories offers a principled, substantive method for doing so,” researchers write. “We propose deriving indicator properties from scientific theories, then basing evaluations of the probability of consciousness in particular systems on whether they possess these indicators.”

Researchers conclude their paper with a warning that the discussion may soon become more than theoretical.

“Given that it may already be possible to build AI systems that possess many of the indicators, in looking ahead we should also contemplate the possibility that some near-future AI systems will be plausible candidates for consciousness,” researchers write. “This would presumably have substantial ethical, legal, and social implications.”

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

In hours of underwater video footage from a New York aquarium, a beluga whale named Natasha stretches her neck, pirouettes, nods, and shakes her head in front of a two-way mirror. Her daughter Maris does much the same. According to a new study published in PLOS One, both animals show the behavioral hallmarks of mirror self-recognition—a cognitive ability long considered a marker of self-awareness, and one that had never before been documented in beluga whales.

If the result holds up, belugas join a remarkably short list. The mirror self-recognition test (MSR) has been passed, with varying degrees of confidence, by humans (starting around age two), a handful of great apes (chimps, bonobos, orangutans, and—somewhat contentiously—gorillas), Asian elephants, bottlenose dolphins, probably magpies, possibly orcas, and, if you can believe it, a cleaner wrasse. That's it. No dogs, no cats, no monkeys. Plenty of species we had assumed were self-aware have been tested and failed.

Looking at the mirror

So what is this test, exactly, and what is it supposed to tell us?

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