Consciousness
MIT paper lays out how focused ultrasound could test theories of consciousness
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Researchers affiliated with MIT argue that transcranial focused ultrasound—a noninvasive technique that can modulate activity in deep brain regions—could enable more direct, cause-and-effect tests of how conscious experiences arise. In a “roadmap” review in *Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews*, they describe experimental approaches aimed at distinguishing between competing accounts of where and how awareness is generated in the brain.
Researchers behind a new review in Frontiers in Science argue that rapid progress in artificial intelligence and brain technologies is outpacing scientific understanding of consciousness, raising the risk of ethical and legal mistakes. They say developing evidence-based tests for detecting awareness—whether in patients, animals or emerging artificial and lab-grown systems—could reshape medicine, welfare debates and technology governance.
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A review article by Borjan Milinkovic and Jaan Aru argues that treating the mind as software running on interchangeable hardware is a poor fit for how brains actually compute. The authors propose “biological computationalism,” a framework that ties cognition and (potentially) consciousness to computation that is hybrid, multi-scale, and shaped by energy constraints.