For decades, debates about consciousness have been driven by elegant theories and small, carefully controlled experiments. Now a large-scale analysis of existing research is forcing a harder question: ...

What does it mean to be conscious? People have been thinking and writing about this question for millennia. Yet many things about the conscious mind remain a mystery, including how to measure and ...

This map of the human brain highlights areas in the prefrontal cortex (green) and the visual cortex (blue) that are thought to be associated with consciousness. The graphs track readings of ...

Those who have experimented with psychedelics often describe a sensation of connectedness with objects around them, things like rocks, trees, or rivers. Sometimes the “connectedness” is more literal, ...

This post is Part I of a series. The field of consciousness studies has come of age. Prior to the 1990s, theories of consciousness were more of a philosophical pursuit than a serious scientific one.