Quantum Effects Can Shape Human Thought, Physicist Shows

Nearly everything published about quantum physics in the brain is nonsense. This time a physicist in Istanbul has come up with something different, and the key move is that quantum effects don't need to last long to leave a permanent mark. No exotic new physics required, and there's a concrete way to test it. Let's take a look.

Neuroscience’s Case Against Free Will Is Falling Apart

In 1983 Benjamin Libet found that brain activity predicts your movements before you are aware of deciding to move. The result has been reproduced many times, and it has been used ever since to argue that free will is an illusion. Three new papers say the measurements were fine but the interpretation was not. Let's take a look.

Neuroscientists Have Been Misreading Brain Scans for Decades

Neuroscientists have long assumed that when a brain region becomes more active, more blood flows to it. That assumption is the entire basis of functional magnetic resonance imaging. A new paper now says it's wrong for about 40% of the signals, and it isn't the only recent study to find that a lot of what we thought we knew about the brain rests on bad measurements. Let's take a look.

Crazy: Scientists Compute With Human Brain Cells

Human brains are roughly 100,000 times more energy-efficient than current AI systems. So why don’t we build computers using human brain cells? Don’t worry, researchers are one step ahead of you there – different teams across the globe are racing to develop neuron computers; processors that integrate living brain neurons into their chips. Let’s take a look at how this technology is developing and when we might see brain cells chips in the future.

Researchers Warn of “Musk Illusion” That Brain Can be Sped Up

These days, if you have internet speeds that run in the kilobits per second range, accessing most things online is probably painfully slow. But according to new research by biologists from Caltech, human brains run at just a fraction of those speeds – they estimate that we process information at just 10 bits per second. They warn of the “Musk Illusion” that new technology could speed up our thinking and say it won’t happen. Let’s find out.

Scientists Measure Qualia for First Time – It was thought to be impossible

For decades, researchers have assumed that qualia – each person’s subjective experiences – can’t be measured. Indeed, the idea of qualia has long been thought to be outside of science. But a few weeks ago, a group of researchers went and measured qualia for the first time. Let’s take a look at what this means for consciousness research.

Origin of consciousness located with new test

The rise of AI has made us humans increasingly question what consciousness really is. In a recent study, researchers pitted two competing theories of consciousness against one another, the controversial Integrated Information Theory versus Global Neuronal Workspace Theory. Let’s take a look at what they found.