In late 2005, five months after a car accident, a 23-year-old woman lay unresponsive in a hospital bed. She had a severe brain injury and showed no sign of awareness. But when researchers scanning her ...

Where in the brain does consciousness originate? Theories abound, but neuroscientists still haven’t coalesced around one explanation, largely because it’s such a hard question to probe with the ...

Is your cat or dog conscious? What about fish? Or honeybees? How would you even know? Paula Droege, a philosopher at Pennsylvania State University, regularly wrestles with how to investigate these ...

The origin of consciousness has teased the minds of philosophers and scientists for centuries. In the last decade, neuroscientists have begun to piece together its neural underpinnings—that is, how ...

The psychology of human interconnectedness can help shift our focus from societal conflict to progress. The enigmatic nature of human consciousness has captivated philosophers and scholars for ...

Philosophers, cognitive scientists, and engineers are grappling with what it would take for AI to become conscious. David Chalmers was not expecting the invitation he received in September of last ...

How consciousness arises in the brain is no clearer after two big theories go head-to-head, but the competition's design could push the field forward. “Theories are like toothbrushes,” it’s sometimes ...

As AI—and the ethical debate surrounding it—accelerates, scientists argue that understanding consciousness is now more urgent than ever. Researchers writing in Frontiers in Science warn that advances ...

A five-year “adversarial collaboration” of consciousness theorists led to a stagy showdown in front of an audience. It crowned no winners — but it can still claim progress. Science routinely puts ...

The first time I went under the knife, I remember the anesthesiologist asking me to count backward. “Ten, nine, eight…” and then it all went black. The next thing I knew, three hours had passed, yet ...