The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Science routinely puts forward theories, then batters them with data till only one is left standing. In the fledgling science of ...

Assessing the severity of brain injuries in people showing little or no signs of awareness can be a tall order for physicians. A study out of the University of Cambridge has uncovered a possible new ...

Dr. Tom McClelland argues that there is no reliable way to know whether AI is conscious, and that this uncertainty may never ...

Before you set a mouse trap, you may want to think — because the mouse might be thinking too. A new study has found that mice appear to recognize themselves in the mirror — placing them in a rarified ...

Consciousness has long resisted neat explanations, but a growing body of research suggests the problem may lie in how we ...

An unconscious person’s response to odors after a serious brain injury may be a simple yet powerful signal of how aware they are and how likely they are to survive and recover, a new study suggests, ...

Is your cat or dog conscious? What about fish? Or honeybees? How would you even know? Paula Droege, a philosopher at Pennsylvania State University, regularly wrestles with how to investigate these ...

A simple "sniff test" could signal if an unconscious person is likely to regain consciousness, a new study finds. A team of scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel revealed that the ...

It’s not for want of data. Ever since Francis Crick, the codiscoverer of DNA’s double helix, legitimized consciousness as a topic for study more than three decades ago, researchers have used a variety ...