#consciousness

#consciousness

Dan Brown's latest thriller, The Secret of Secrets, follows neuroscientist Katherine Solomon as she reports how low GABA, an inhibitory neurotransmitter in the nervous system, expands consciousness. She states in her research that low levels of GABA enable things like telepathy, remote viewing, and more. She explains that on our deathbeds, we experience a precipitous drop in GABA, revealing to us what lies beyond. Her science leads to a mind-bending cat-and-mouse chase around the most beautiful parts of Prague.

"The man (person) behind the camera" refers to an observer or witness not only to the surrounding world, but also to one's own sensations, feelings, impulses, instincts, thoughts, and experiences. Seeing more than their external and internal environments, this observer has a higher level of awareness, the cognitive awareness of awareness, or meta-awareness. Within the animal world, humans have been described as uniquely being aware of being aware.

It's mind-bending, norm-challenging work that explores the metaphysical-which is why I'd expected something a little more mystical. A spiral staircase, an owl, a crystal ball. The divination tower at Hogwarts. Certainly not a mid-rise straight out of Anywhere, USA. Only there it was, visible through the glass front door: a placard in the lobby reading "Division of Perceptual Studies." The door handle turned with a wiggle.

In his Introduction to Psychology, the father of psychology as a scientific discipline, Wihlem Wundt, wrote that "This science has to investigate the facts of consciousness, its combinations and relations, so that it may ultimately discover the laws which govern these relations and combinations." However, his use of introspection, or "internal perception," lacked the tools for observing, reproducing, or experimentally modulating these internal perceptions, and the field of psychology was on the brink of collapse.

Unlike many modern psychologists, he felt the field should encompass paranormal phenomena and mystical experiences. As well as writing one of the great studies of mystical experiences, The Varieties of Religious Experience, he self-experimented with psychoactive substances such as nitrous oxide and ether. (From this perspective, a mystical experience is an experience of heightened awareness, in which the world becomes more vivid and beautiful, and there is a sense of oneness and bliss, as well as a sense of meaning and revelation.)

How do you know you exist? Seeing, hearing, loving, fearing, dreading, dreaming, imagining. Those are all different types of conscious experience. When I see something or hear something, my supposition is, of course, that this is reality, but it's not reality. All we see and all we hear and all we touch, etc, is always mediated by our senses and through our brains. That is very much different in each individual.

Do we learn more about Langdon? Not much. He is still so world-renowned that, as doesn't happen for most academics, fancy hotels monogram his slippers for him. His password for most things is Dolphin123, because he's good at swimming. He is too old-fashioned to like texting or videogames, and just a little prudish. He has never seen When Harry Met Sally, but has heard about the famous sex scene'.

More than half a billion people around the world have downloaded artificial-intelligence chatbot companion apps such as Xiaoice and Replika. These virtual confidantes can provide empathy, support and, sometimes, deep relationships. Chatbots, of course, aren't consciousthey just feel that way to users, who often become emotionally attached to them. As AI grows more fluent in mimicking human empathy, language and memory, we're left to confront an uneasy problem: If a machine can fake awareness so well, what exactly is the real thing?

For some people, sleep brings a peculiar kind of wakefulness. Not a dream, but a quiet awareness with no content. This lesser-known state of consciousness may hold clues to one of science's biggest mysteries: what it means to be conscious. The state of conscious sleep has been widely described for centuries by different Eastern contemplative traditions. For instance, the Indian philosophical school of the Advaita Vedanta, grounded in the interpretation of the Vedas - one of the oldest texts in Hinduism - understands deep sleep or "sushupti" as a state of "just awareness" in which we merely remain conscious.

I mean, the amazing thing about our circumstances that each one of us is in a position that is in some sense, as free and as profound and as in touch with reality, as any other position in this universe, where you stand, the universe is illuminated as you, as your experience in this moment. And that we call this substratum of experience, consciousness, for lack of a better word.

Psychologists and philosophers have developed competing theories of humor, claiming laughter results from factors such as superiority, relief, incongruity, and benign violations.

The sense that we are a solid entity, an unchanging entity that exists someplace in our body and takes ownership of our body, and even ownership of our brain rather than being identical to our brain, that is where the illusion lies.

Increasingly, organoids are being fused to create 'assembloids', complexes of interacting organoids. Sergiu Pasca's laboratory at Stanford University has created an assembloid that models the human spinothalamic pathway, a neural circuit critical for the transmission of sensory information from the body to the brain.

For Hegel, intelligence is always artificial, with nothing natural about understanding, consciousness, or intelligence itself, challenging the idea of innate behavior versus learned actions.

Matthew Sacchet, director of the meditation research program at Harvard Medical School, indicates that meditation, while beneficial for many, can also lead to significant suffering in some individuals. This unexpected outcome has prompted calls for greater scrutiny by researchers and clinicians into the effects of meditation beyond its therapeutic applications.

"Reflecting on one's life in a consciousness-raising session, Gornick wrote, was 'rather like shaking a kaleidoscope and watching all the same pieces rearrange themselves into an altogether other picture.'"},{

I think we've got much too narrow a picture of reality. What we need is a larger, more inclusive model of reality, which includes all these anomalies in the Universe.

"Until the early 20th century, scientists believed they had most of the puzzle solved. They viewed the world as a perfect machine, predictable and logical, based on Newton's laws."

This research opens the door to a deeper understanding of lucid dreaming as an intricate state of consciousness by pointing to the possibility that conscious experience can arise from within sleep itself.