In Newen and Montemayor’s evolutionary framework, basic arousal developed first. It’s like nature’s security alarm, warning ...

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 ...

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 ...

Understanding how the brain creates conscious experience remains one of science’s most difficult challenges. Brain scans and ...

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 ...

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 ...

For decades, artificial intelligence has existed only in our fiction. We’ve imagined intelligent computer programs and malicious machines in everything from Terminator and The Matrix to I, Robot, and ...

Tantalizing clues in 4-billion-year-old asteroid Bennu samples could reveal particular molecular formations that some ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already helping to solve problems in finance, research and medicine. But could it be reaching consciousness? Dr Tom McClelland, a philosopher from the University of ...

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 ...