Consciousness – the internal dialogue that seems to govern one’s thoughts and actions -is far less powerful than people believe, serving as a passive conduit rather than an active force that exerts control, according to a new theory proposed in the journalBehavioral and Brain Sciences. “The interpreter presents the information but is not the one […]
A four-year international study of 2,060 cardiac arrest cases in 15 hospitals in the United Kingdom, United States, and Austria has concluded that in some cases of cardiac arrest, so called out-of-body experiences may correspond with actual events. The AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) study, published in the journalResuscitation, also tested the validity of conscious experiences […]
Free will, the ability that we believe we have to make choices – and mistakes – might arise from simple random fluctuations in the brain’s background electrical noise, say neuroscientists from the University of California, Davis. “How do we behave independently of cause and effect?” said Jesse Bengson, a researcher at the University’s Center for […]
Incorporating the recent discovery of quantum vibrations inside brain neurons, a new assessment of a controversial 20-year-old theory of consciousness presents compelling evidence for the idea that consciousness derives from very fine scale activities inside brain neurons. The new review, by scientific heavyweights Stuart Hameroff and Sir Roger Penrose, appears in the journal Physics of […]
Understanding how our brains encode thoughts at the cellular level may be a step closer after neuroscientists at MIT discovered groups of neurons encoding specific behavioral rules by oscillating in synchrony, a finding that suggests conscious thought emerges from oscillatory cycles in the brain. The findings, published in Neuron, could help science to finally unravel […]
A bigger brain doesn’t mean more intelligence, say biologists at the University of London who suggest that insects could be as intelligent as much bigger animals and that only a few thousand neurons may be necessary to generate consciousness. Differences in brain size are extreme. A whale’s brain can weigh up to 9 kg (with […]
