Pocket Archive: Science & Consciousness

University of California at Berkeley professor and child development expert Alison Gopnik explains what it takes for you to become an awesome parent.

Between Barden Tower and Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire, England, lies one of nature's most dangerous booby traps. It’s a small innocuous-loo...

Posted in r/RationalPsychonaut by u/RJPatrick • 70 points and 26 comments

You’ve probably heard about duck penises—that they’re shaped like corkscrews, and that females have vaginas that corkscrew in the opposite direction. That one’s easy. But animal sex gets a whole lot weirder, with sexual dismemberment, servitude, and freaky parasitism that makes the duck’s corkscrew seem practically…um…straight? The current issue of our magazine is all about \[…\]

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

Atul Gawande on what it means to be a scientist in a time of increasing mistrust toward the scientific community.

Posted in r/philosophy by u/phileconomicus • 467 points and 653 comments

First modern scans of people high on psychedelic drug has given researchers unprecedented insight into neural basis for its effects

Author Summary Integrated information theory (IIT) approaches the relationship between consciousness and its physical substrate by first identifying the fundamental properties of experience itself: existence, composition, information, integration, and exclusion. IIT then postulates that the physical substrate of consciousness must satisfy these very properties. We develop a detailed mathematical framework in which composition, information, integration, and exclusion are defined precisely and made operational. This allows us to establish to what extent simple systems of mechanisms, such as logic gates or neuron-like elements, can form complexes that can account for the fundamental properties of consciousness. Based on this principled approach, we show that IIT can explain many known facts about consciousness and the brain, leads to specific predictions, and allows us to infer, at least in principle, both the quantity and quality of consciousness for systems whose causal structure is known. For example, we show that some simple systems can be minimally conscious, some complicated systems can be unconscious, and two different systems can be functionally equivalent, yet one is conscious and the other one is not.

Drug researcher David Nutt discusses brain-imaging studies with hallucinogens.

An animated guide to 42 different species of butterflies.

Brain cells that track our location also can track time and distance, a study finds. This could explain how the brain uses place and time to organize memories throughout our lives.

Memory erasing is just the beginning.

Posted in r/AskReddit by u/prototype03 • 20,877 points and 15,534 comments

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Shouts & Murmurs by Ethan Kuperberg: “Which is heavier, a ton of feathers or a ton of gold? Everything is equal in a cruelly indifferent universe.”

Scientists dove deeper into the mystery of sleep this year.

Scientists have begun to identify the symphony of biological triggers that powered the extraordinary expansion of the human brain.

If you’ve ever looked up at the brightest and closest celestial object in the night sky, our Moon, you’ve probably noticed how different some parts of it appear to be from others. And if you’ve ever taken a look at it through a telescope, especially if it’s not in its full phase, you’ve very likely n

One of the oddest predictions of quantum theory – that a system can't change while you're watching it – has been confirmed in an experiment by Cornell physicists. Their work opens the door to a fundamentally new method to control and manipulate the quantum states of atoms and could lead to new kinds of sensors.