Detecting Consciousness - Vagal Implants - Cell Memory - Optical Illusions

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Aug 2, 2025, 7:28:13 AMAug 2

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02349-5

How to detect consciousness in people, animals and maybe even AI

Mariana Lenharo

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 brain asked her to imagine playing tennis, something striking happened: brain areas linked to movement lit up on her scan1.

The experiment, conceived by neuroscientist Adrian Owen and his colleagues, suggested that the woman understood the instructions and decided to cooperate — despite appearing to be unresponsive. Owen, now at Western University in London, Canada, and his colleagues had introduced a new way to test for consciousness. Whereas some previous tests relied on observing general brain activity, this strategy zeroed in on activity directly linked to a researcher’s verbal command.

The strategy has since been applied to hundreds of unresponsive people, revealing that many maintain an inner life and are aware of the world around them, at least to some extent. A 2024 study found that one in four people who were physically unresponsive had brain activity that suggested they could understand and follow commands to imagine specific activities, such as playing tennis or walking through a familiar space2. The tests rely on advanced neuroimaging techniques, so are mostly limited to research settings because of their high costs and the needed expertise. But since 2018, medical guidelines have started to recommend using these tests in clinical practice3.

Since these methods emerged, scientists have been developing ways to probe layers of consciousness that are even more hidden. The stakes are high. Tens of thousands of people worldwide are currently in a persistent unresponsive state. Assessing their consciousness can guide important treatment decisions, such as whether to keep them on life support. Studies also suggest that hospitalized, unresponsive people with hidden signs of awareness are more likely to recover than are those without such signs (see, for example, ref. 4).

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https://www.thetransmitter.org/consciousness/babies-bees-and-bots-on-the-hunt-for-markers-of-consciousness/

Babies, bees and bots: On the hunt for markers of consciousness

By Tim Bayne

One of the key scientific questions about consciousness concerns its distribution. We know that adult humans have the capacity for consciousness, but what about human neonates, bees or artificial intelligence (AI) systems? Who else—other than ourselves—belongs in the “consciousness club,” and how might we figure this out?

It is tempting to assume, as many do, that we need a theory of consciousness to answer the distribution question. In the words of neuroscientists Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch, “we need not only more data but also a theory of consciousness—one that says what experience is and what type of physical systems can have it.” This is what philosopher Jonathan Birch has labeled the “theory-heavy” approach to the distribution problem.

But there are serious issues with the theory-heavy approach. One is that we don’t have a consensus theory of consciousness. In a highly selective review that Anil Seth and I published in 2022, we listed no fewer than 22 neurobiological theories of consciousness. This overabundance of theories could reasonably be ignored if most agreed on fundamental questions in the field, such as which systems have the capacity for consciousness or the question of when consciousness first emerges in human development, but they don’t.

A further problem with the theory-heavy approach is that in order to speak to the distribution problem, a theory cannot be restricted to consciousness as it occurs in adult humans, but must also apply to human infants, nonhuman animals, synthetic biological systems and AI. But because theories are largely based on data drawn from the study of adult humans, there will inevitably be a gap between the evidence base of a general theory and its scope. Why should we think that a theory developed in response to adult humans applies to different kinds of systems?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/health/arthritis-implant-vagus-setpoint.html

New Implant Offers Hope for Easing Rheumatoid Arthritis

By Roni Caryn Rabin

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved a medical device that offers new hope to patients incapacitated by rheumatoid arthritis, a chronic condition that afflicts 1.5 million Americans and is often resistant to treatment.

The condition is usually managed with medications. The device represents a radical departure from standard care, tapping the power of the brain and nervous system to tamp down the uncontrolled inflammation that leads to the debilitating autoimmune disease.

The SetPoint System is an inch-long device that is surgically implanted into the neck, where it sits in a pod wrapped around the vagus nerve, which some scientists believe is the longest nerve in the body. The device electrically stimulates the nerve for one minute each day.

The stimulation can turn off crippling inflammation and “reset” the immune system, research has shown. Most drugs used to treat rheumatoid arthritis suppress the immune system, leaving patients vulnerable to serious infections.

On a recent episode of the American College of Rheumatology podcast, the SetPoint implant was described as representing a “true paradigm shift” in treatment of the disease, which until now has relied almost entirely on an evolving set of pharmaceutical interventions, from gold salts to powerful agents called biologics.

The F.D.A. designated the implant as a breakthrough last year in order to expedite its development and approval. It represents an early test of the promise of so-called bioelectronic medicine to modulate inflammation, which plays a key role in diseases including diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

Clinical trials are already underway testing vagus nerve stimulation to manage inflammatory bowel disease in children, lupus and other conditions. Trials for patients with multiple sclerosis and Crohn’s disease are also planned.

In a yearlong randomized controlled trial of 242 patients that included a sham-treatment arm, over half of the participants using the SetPoint implant alone achieved remission or saw their disease recede. Measures of joint pain and swelling fell by 60 percent and 63 percent, respectively.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-can-a-cell-remember-20250730/

What Can a Cell Remember?

By Claire L. Evans

In 1983, the octogenarian geneticist Barbara McClintock stood at the lectern of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. She was famously publicity averse — nearly a hermit — but it’s customary for people to speak when they’re awarded a Nobel Prize, so she delivered a halting account of the experiments that had led to her discovery, in the early 1950s, of how DNA sequences can relocate across the genome. Near the end of the speech, blinking through wire-framed glasses, she changed the subject, asking: “What does a cell know of itself?”

McClintock had a reputation for eccentricity. Still, her question seemed more likely to come from a philosopher than a plant geneticist. She went on to describe lab experiments in which she had seen plant cells respond in a “thoughtful manner.” Faced with unexpected stress, they seemed to adjust in ways that were “beyond our present ability to fathom.” What does a cell know of itself? It would be the work of future biologists, she said, to find out.

Forty years later, McClintock’s question hasn’t lost its potency. Some of those future biologists are now hard at work unpacking what “knowing” might mean for a single cell, as they hunt for signs of basic cognitive phenomena — like the ability to remember and learn — in unicellular creatures and nonneural human cells alike. Science has long taken the view that a multicellular nervous system is a prerequisite for such abilities, but new research is revealing that single cells, too, keep a record of their experiences for what appear to be adaptive purposes.

In a provocative study published in Nature Communications late last year, the neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin and his mentor Thomas J. Carew at New York University showed that human kidney cells growing in a dish can “remember” patterns of chemical signals (opens a new tab) when they’re presented at regularly spaced intervals — a memory phenomenon common to all animals, but unseen outside the nervous system until now. Kukushkin is part of a small but enthusiastic cohort of researchers studying “aneural,” or brainless, forms of memory. What does a cell know of itself? So far, their research suggests that the answer to McClintock’s question might be: much more than you think.
© 2025 Simons Foundation

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https://www.npr.org/2025/07/30/1256429522/brain-magic-illusion-of-the-year-vision

Optical illusions are a brain feature, not a bug. Here's the science behind them

Emily Kwong

A grayscale ballerina who appears to be moving. A human who can fit in a doll box. A black-and-white prism which appear to change shape when viewed from three different directions.

Those are the top winners of the 2024 Best Illusion of the Year Contest, open to illusion makers around the world.

The contest was co-created by neuroscientist and science writer Susana Martinez-Conde. After 20 years, Martinez-Conde is still amazed that novel illusions keep coming in — submitted by artists, magicians, vision scientists and illusion makers all over the world.

"Illusions are fundamental to the way that we perceive the world — the way that, frankly, we exist as human beings. Illusions are a feature and not a bug," she told

All illusions are perceptual experiences that do not match physical reality.

Aristotle was one of the first to document an illusion in nature, the so-called "waterfall illusion," or motion aftereffect. When someone watches a moving stimulus, such as a river, a nearby stationary object, like a rock, may also appear to move. Other famous illusions include "Rotating Snakes," which Martinez-Conde has studied as part of her research into peripheral drift.

As a scientist, Martinez-Conde sees as illusions as an opportunity to study how the human brain constructs perceptions of the world. "We can analyze the neurons and the brain circuits that support neural activity that matches perception, and those could be part of the neural basis of consciousness."

Voting for the 2025 Best Illusion of the Year will take place next year. The online contest is run by the non-profit Neural Correlate Society.
© 2025 npr

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/health/alzheimers-dementia-healthy-lifestyle.html

Healthy Lifestyle Can Help People at Risk for Dementia

By Pam Belluck

A combination of healthy activities including exercise, nutritious diet, computer brain games and socializing can improve cognitive performance in people at risk for dementia, according to a large new study.

The study, conducted in five locations across the United States over two years, is the biggest randomized trial to examine whether healthy behaviors protect brain health.

“It confirms that paying attention to things like physical activity and vascular risk factors and diet are all really important ways to maintain brain health,” said Dr. Kristine Yaffe, an expert in cognitive aging at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study.

The results were presented on Monday at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Toronto and published in the journal JAMA.

The study involved 2,111 people, ages 60 to 79, from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. None were cognitively impaired. All had sedentary lifestyles, suboptimal diets and two other dementia risk factors, such as a family history of cognitive decline and high blood pressure.

Half of the participants followed a structured program. They were prescribed a healthy diet, socially engaging activities and a weekly regimen of eight exercise sessions and three sessions of computerized cognitive training. They attended 38 meetings with facilitators and fellow participants.

The other participants followed a self-guided program. They were given educational materials and resources, and were regularly encouraged to engage in healthy behaviors. They attended six team meetings during the study.
© 2025 The New York Times Company