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How floating in darkness challenges our concept of the self

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Musings

Excerpt adapted from Buddha in the Float Tank

What is a float tank? What does it teach us about perception, selfhood, and out-of-body experiences?

The tank is a lightproof, soundproof chamber filled with saline water. This solution, saturated with Epson salt, is so dense that one floats effortlessly, with no muscle tension. What’s more, the water is heated to the temperature of the skin. Thus, besides being dark and silent, the tank is also absent of any gravitational, tactile, or thermal sensations. The so-called proprioceptive sense, which operates outside the traditional five senses to locate limbs and other body parts in space, also goes dormant in the tank. Once the body is still, floating effortlessly, all that’s left is the mind.

Except, the mind is all you ever had to begin with. Everything you ever see, hear, or touch is happening in the mind. How could it be otherwise? Nothing really changes in the tank. The tank just reveals the nondual nature of consciousness.

What is nonduality?

Here, we need to get philosophical for a moment. The term nondual emphasizes that subject and object are not separate. The world is not “out there” while the self is “in here”. The perceiver and the perceived are one. Consider this illustration below from Wikipedia. If “I” am located somewhere internal to my head, watching the world outside like a person in a movie theater, then how does this little homunculus perceive the inside of the theater? There would need to be a little person in his head, and so forth, ad infinitum.

The ordinary, dualistic way of thinking about perception leads to an infinite regress. Illustration by Wikimedia users Reverie, Pbroks13, and Was a bee. CC-BY-SA-2.5,2.0,1.0

It’s one thing to grasp nonduality intellectually. It’s another thing entirely to grasp it through direct experience. The illusion of separateness from the world is so convincing that we rarely glimpse through it.

The float tank makes it easier to see through this illusion. The ordinary sense of being a subject in the head looking out at objects in the world ceases when that world disappears in the tank. One no longer feels that they are experiencing things from a distance. Rather, there is just consciousness.

Out-of-body experiences

There’s another curious consequence of the zero-stimulus environment called dissociation, or extreme psychological detachment. Here, we encounter a paradox: the body is perceived more clearly, but in a new, non-self context. On the one hand, it’s unsurprising that one becomes more aware of bodily sensations in the float tank, for these are the only sensory channels that are still buzzing with information. Indeed, enhanced cardiorespiratory awareness in the tank has been reported in scientific research. On the other hand, because one no longer feels like a subject internal to the body, the body is no longer the center of awareness. Nondual awareness is centerless, which probably explains reports of out-of-body experiences in the tank (including my own brief experience).Except where noted otherwise, the above reflections on floating and nondual awareness are anecdotal, based on my own float sessions. However, the idea that floating alters self-perception in a manner similar to meditation or even psychedelics drugs is also supported by a neuroimaging study of healthy volunteers who had brain scans before and after three float sessions. These volunteers showed changes in the brain’s default mode network—widely regarded as a neural substrate of the autobiographical self—similar to what has been reported in other studies of meditation and psychedelic substances like psilocybin and LSD.

Functional connectivity, or statistical relationships, between and within hubs of the default mode network is reduced by floating in healthy volunteers. Blue lines show relationships that are weaker after the experience. A similar yet weaker pattern was observed for a control condition in which volunteers reclined in a chair in a dark and quiet room instead of floating. Source: Al Zoubi et al. 2021 Human Brain Mapping

Conclusion

Of course, there’s still much that we don’t know about how floating compares to other altered states of consciousness, and whether it has similar (and likely safer) therapeutic potential as psychedelics seem to have for mental illness. I strongly advocate for future research to address these questions.This exert was adapted from a recent post, Buddha in the Float Tank, on Joel Frohlich’s Substack newsletter, Something It’s Like. Click to the link above to read the full post, including Joel’s perspective on inner and outward journeys in the context of travel.

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Erik Hoel

Interview with Erik Hoel, neuroscientist and author

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Musings

In my last post, I shared my reflections on Erik Hoel’s wonderful book on the science of consciousness, The World Behind the World. As a follow up, he was kind enough to answer my questions over email about both his book and his very exciting career. Erik was a professor at Tuft’s University until 2023, when he left academia to work full time on his Substack newsletter, The Intrinsic Perspective. He holds a doctorate in neuroscience, which he earned working under Giulio Tononi on the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He wears many hats as a writer: popular non-fiction (The World Behind the World), essayist (The Intrinsic Perspective), and novelist (The Revelations, published in 2021).

“I think there’s been too much focus on technological progress as the driver of human civilization and not enough on the cognitive tools”

Joel:       The beginning of your book introduces the intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives in the context of Julian Jaynes’s work. Do you think the seemingly impoverished accounts of subjective experience by ancient people, noted in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, are really telling us how ancient people thought about consciousness per se, or the development of selfhood? For example, if ancient people interpreted their thoughts as the gods speaking to them, could this suggest that they had not yet developed the sort of selfhood that we take for granted today?

Erik:       They were people steeped in myth and metaphor. Religion for them was like science is for us – it was the way the world works. So I think they still had selves, in the modern sense, but their reality model was so different it looks as if they themselves were different. Additionally, and I try to stress this point in the book, we have all sorts of cognitive abstract tools that they didn’t. These are things that took a long time to develop, and include the ability to even talk about selves in detail, describe consciousness in detail, and so on, things I group under “the intrinsic perspective.” Even a teenager can now do stream of consciousness writing without having read Joyce – they’ve absorbed the ability by osmosis. But that had to be invented. I think there’s been too much focus on technological progress as the driver of human civilization and not enough on the cognitive tools, like the ability to describe consciousness, better narrative abilities, clearer causal reasoning, even empiricism itself.

Read Joel Frohlich’s reflections on The World Behind the World and accompanying photos
featuring Stella Dorrestein from an earlier blog post.


“I don’t know if emptiness or non-self is really anything fundamental to human nature”

Joel:       Your writing on the intrinsic perspective strongly emphasizes the literary development of the novel, and literary techniques like stream of consciousness, as central to this perspective’s development in Western culture. How do you perceive the novel’s role in exploring subjective experiences in comparison to more formal introspective practices like meditation? Do you practice meditation?

Erik:       I don’t practice meditation. But I’m familiar with it – regularly in my childhood actual Buddhist monks would stay at our house. My mother would host them to teach classes at her bookstore, or build sand mandalas. Perhaps seeing that these were people, up close, made the mysticism of the whole thing a lot less attractive.

Joel:       Are there aspects of subjective experiences which are rarely introspected upon in novels? For instance, one might not learn about the optic blindspot from reading fiction, much less deeper aspects of experience that are fundamental in the Buddhist tradition, such as emptiness or non-self.

Erik:       I don’t know if emptiness or non-self is really anything fundamental to human nature, given the scope of human civilization. I think you can get to such states, with practice, but there’s a reason it takes practice.

Joel:       In your work, you discuss the prospect of adding selfhood as an axiom to IIT (the integrated information theory of consciousness developed by Giulio Tononi). How do you perceive schools of Buddhism or Advaita, which are centered on concepts of non-self or non-duality?

Erik:       I think these are of phenomenological interest, but again, does a meditator experiencing some hard-to-reach state of consciousness tell us anything of deep scientific interest about consciousness? Honestly, probably not. I’m actually bearish on any approaches to consciousness like that, instead of reflecting on normal, untrained phenomenology, so much as such a thing exists (the latter is what IIT does).

Is non-self fundamental to human experience? Photo by Daniel Mingook Kim on Unsplash.

Joel:       Paraphrasing Theodosius Dobzhansky, you’ve written that nothing in the brain makes sense except in light of consciousness. Is this true for all disciplines in neuroscience? For instance, do neuroscientists studying motor disorders like Parkinson’s disease need the intrinsic perspective?

Erik:       I think it’s a problem of scale. If Parkinson’s really is just a problem with dopaminergic neurons totally localized to the substantia nigra, then no, you don’t need a theory of consciousness. But I’m pretty clear that a lot of molecular neurobiology can proceed apace without a theory, and if Parkinson’s can be explained entirely that way, then it falls under that umbrella. It’s cognitive neuroscience that is in trouble without a theory of consciousness.

“I think [my] book is sort of fundamentally complete in that it really doesn’t focus much on the news of the day.”

Joel:       You’ve written about the stagnation of progress in neuroscience due to its preparadigmatic immaturity. If we had a comprehensive theory of consciousness tomorrow, what is the first practical breakthrough you would anticipate?

Erik:       There wouldn’t just be one first one, there would be a Cambrian explosion. I would expect to basically throw out the textbooks and write new ones, and that would start happening immediately. But from a very practical perspective probably the first main effect would be to resolve longstanding debates about AI consciousness, either how to build it or why it’s impossible and to what degree current systems count, which has significant practical implications for basically everyone given how integrated the technology already is becoming with search, operating systems, etc. 

Joel:       How far can the NCC (neural correlates of consciousness) approach take us toward practical advances without a guiding theory of consciousness? For example, there’s great interest now in developing non-hallucinogenic psychedelic drugs. Do you think this effort can succeed without a theory driven approach?

Erik:       We’ve identified plenty of drugs that work on the brain prior to a theory of consciousness, but it’s mostly either (a) luck, or (b) simply variations on what we know works already, which was originally a consequence of luck. So it could very well work. Personally, I doubt that the antidepressant effects can be simulated without the experience, however.

How far can the science of the mind progress without a theory of consciousness? Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

Joel:       You’ve had a lot of news to reflect on in your Substack newsletter for the past year. Shortly before your book came out last year, LLMs like ChatGPT exploded onto the scene; then, shortly after the book’s release, a letter attacking IIT as pseudoscience was posted on PsyArXiv. Is there anything new you wish you could have included in your book? If so, how might it have covered these topics?

Erik:       I think the book is sort of fundamentally complete in that it really doesn’t focus much on the news of the day. That’s both an advantage of books and a disadvantage. I probably wouldn’t write a book about AI, since it’s changing so fast there’s no point. At least, right now.

Joel:       What’s next for your career? Are you working on a new book?

Erik:       I do have plans for more books, and I’m doing some private research on the side about consciousness and emergence. But what’s immediately next is just a bunch of essays and ideas planned for my newsletter.

“I’m very excited for the next generation of consciousness researchers”

Joel:       If you could invite any living author or scientist to write a foreword to the next edition of The World Behind the World, whom would you invite and why?

Erik:       There are a number of people, from Anil Seth to David Chalmers to Giulio Tononi (my PhD mentor) that I think are still doing really interesting work. But I sort of know most of their opinions, so what they’d say wouldn’t surprise me. I’m very excited for the next generation of consciousness researchers, so perhaps someone whose name I don’t currently know, but will in the future.

Erik Hoel’s doctoral supervisor, Giulio Tononi, is the author of Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul.
Photo by Joel Frohlich, featuring Stella Dorrestein.

Joel:       What sort of reception has The World Behind the World received since it came out last year? Are you pleased with how it’s been received? How has it been received in academia? Has anyone tried to pull you back into the ivory tower?

Erik:       I don’t keep track of the reception of anything I do, on any sort of level. I retweet what I get tagged in, just because that’s what you’re supposed to do, it’s what the person expects, and it’s a strategy on social media about which I don’t have to put much thought in. But I learned long ago that actually tracking down anything else is just a path to pain. All you can do is just put things out in the world and hope people like them or that they have some influence, but you can’t think about it too long. As for myself, no one has tried to pull me back into academia, even though Tufts University still brags about me on Twitter and refers to me “Tufts’ Erik Hoel” and so on. I left for a number of reasons, some more personal than others, but one of the more practical ones was that I was afraid it would be a continuing struggle to get grants for my research. Several months after I left, I heard from a grant source that I had gotten something like a half-million-dollar grant from an application they had had languishing for years. But of course, they now wouldn’t award it. So I feel I have unfinished business in academia, and would like to return at some point to in a research position, while continuing to write. I do miss working with PhD students on new projects; I think I ran an inventive and interesting lab. If some institution reached out with an offer of an affiliation for a research professorship, I wouldn’t say no.

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Visiting the “World Behind the World”

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Musings

I’m a bit late to the party–it’s hard to shop for English language books here in Germany–but I finally read Erik Hoel’s 2023 book on the science of consciousness: The World Behind the World. Well, this world between the book covers is fantastic. I’m not here so much to review Hoel’s book–which anyone interested in the mind and consciousness should buy–so much as I’m here to celebrate some of its gems while also responding to some of its bolder claims.

Two perspectives

The book begins by establishing the intellectual development of humanity’s two perspectives: the subjective and the objective, or the intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives, respectively. There’s much surprising territory here. Remember how a few years ago, the internet started buzzing with stories about how some ancient cultures didn’t have a word for the color blue? Well, long before this was trendy, Princeton University psychologist and author Julian Jaynes speculated that ancient people didn’t even have an intrinsic perspective in the same way that we do, as characters in many ancient myths and poems generally lack internal dialogue or much of an inner life. Hoel and I both find the strong version of this argument silly: Homo sapiens were obviously conscious before innovations in culture and literature revealed deeper characters with internal experiences, despite Jaynes’ claims to the contrary in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. However, a more plausible idea stemming from Jaynes’ work is that human beings simply did not thoroughly develop the concept of an intrinsic perspective, on an intellectual and artistic level, until cultural developments which occurred perhaps a couple of thousand years ago (for example, in Greek theater). My own take on this, which I think departs a bit from Hoel’s, is that ancient people were perhaps more likely to recognize the nondual nature of consciousness, acknowledged in traditions such as Buddhism and Advaita; that is, they had not yet constructed an ego that sits on consciousness, observing the outside world from the inside. This is possibly supported by Jaynes’ observation, retold by Hoel, that some ancient cultures interpreted thoughts as “the commandments of the gods”, having a hallucinatory quality. Such detachment from thought might sound like mental illness to you, but similar experiences are regarded as enlightenment in some Eastern schools of philosophy and religion.

From here, Hoel takes us through the story of the intrinsic perspective from both a literary and scientific perspective, as only a novelist and neuroscientist can. This story brings us to contemporary theories and thought experiments that illuminate the intrinsic perspective. Even if you’re a scholar of consciousness like me, there are many delightful gems to be found here. For instance, you might already know about David Chalmer’s zombie thought experiment–is a world conceivable in which everyone behaves exactly the same way but lacks consciousness? I’ve read much about this thought experiment over the years: if you find this scenario conceivable, then it seems that a materialistic account of the universe is incomplete, as you cannot derive consciousness from physical laws (after all, everything is physically identical between our universe and the zombie universe). However, there’s a particular glitch here that’s long dampened the conceivability of the zombie world for me: how could zombies possibly talk about consciousness? Before reading Hoel’s book, I only knew of this glitch from Chalmer’s appearance on Sam Harris’s podcast, which I’ve written about elsewhere. But Hoel takes this very meta perspective on the zombie argument much further in the chapter “The Tale of Zombie Descartes”. I won’t spoil the fun, but if you like paradoxes, this is your kind of book.

Another absolute gem for me is Hoel’s analogy between the inaccessibility of consciousness, an inherently private phenomenon, to the inaccessibility of the inside of a black hole in the chapter “Phenomenological Theories of Consciousness”. Though Hoel doesn’t make this next point explicitly, it seems straightforward then to argue that psychologists and neuroscientists studying consciousness are legitimate scientists just as cosmologists and physicists studying the inside of black holes are legitimate scientists. Both are peering behind the curtain of observability, into a space that no instrument can directly measure, and even while some of their predictions cannot be tested, enough testable predictions remain that their theories are overall falsifiable.

The World Behind the World tells the story of two perspectives, the extrinsic and the intrinsic.

Why do we need a theory of consciousness?

Much of Hoel’s book is focused on why we need a theory of consciousness. Overall, I couldn’t agree more that we need such a theory. We also agree that it’s unwise to label ambitious theories of consciousness as pseudoscience, a response to developments soon after Hoel’s book was published, and that introspection should play a larger role in neuroscience–the intrinsic perspective must be accounted for alongside the extrinsic perspective if we want to understand the mind. However, Hoel and I disagree slightly on the scope of this issue. In his words echoing biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Nothing in the brain makes sense except in the light of consciousness.” I, on the other hand, think the brain generally makes plenty of sense without consciousness (hence, the zombie thought experiment). Whereas Hoel believes that brains evolved for consciousness, I think it’s straightforward to argue that the brain evolved for motor coordination and movement–everything else is just a nice bonus that came later. Consider, for instance, that many small insects, like fruit flies, obviously have a brain but are not obviously conscious (they might be, but their brains make plenty of sense without consciousness). Moreover, many parts of the human brain, such as the cerebellum (which contains most of the brain’s neurons) and the basal ganglia are heavily involved in motor functions but play little if any role in consciousness. Of course, that observation is itself useful for understanding consciousness; consciousness researchers need neuroscience, but not all neuroscientists need consciousness research.

Because we cannot understand consciousness, the very thing that Hoel believes brains evolved for, he views neuroscience as an immature science lacking fundamental principles (that is, the field is “pre-paradigmatic”). Besides dedicating an entire chapter of his book to this issue, Hoel has also summarized his views in an online essay (I’ll be reflecting on this chapter in a later post). While I’m not convinced that we always need to put subjective experience (the intrinsic perspective) first to understand the brain (the extrinsic perspective), one area where this approach makes perfect sense to me is our quest to understand dreaming. Neuroscientists still have virtually no idea why we dream each night, and Hoel’s “overfitted brain hypothesis” from 2021 is a brilliant use of the phenomenology first approach. In a research paper published in the journal Patterns, Hoel has put forth the most convincing theory of dreaming I’ve ever encountered: dreams and their bizarre phenomenology are necessary for us to learn to generalize from our daily experiences to novel situations. Even if neuroscience isn’t preparadigmatic, the field of dream research certainly was, in my view, until Hoel’s theory.

Erik Hoel is also the author of a novel titled The Revelations

Does free will exist?

Despite my nitpicking, Hoel and I generally agree on more things than we disagree. The only place where I found area where I firmly diverge from Hoel’s perspective is the book’s last chapter, “The Scientific Case for Free Will”. Here, Hoel argues that humans have free will because of emergent causation. This concept tells us that brains and behavior cannot always be reduced to the microscopic level of individual cells, for many microscopic brain states correspond to the same mental state or behavior. I agree that the correct spatial scale to study the brain isn’t always the firing of single cells. I even agree with Hoel that Benjamin Libet’s famous prediction of volitional decisions from earlier brain activity isn’t really a knockout blow to free will. But I also don’t think we even need neurobiology to see that free will doesn’t make sense. And since Hoel’s argument for free will is really the climax of the book, I feel some need to respond to it.

To give my perspective, I’ll paraphrase Sam Harris, who also views neuroscience as a distraction for understanding the illusion of free will. Let’s suppose reductionism is false. Let’s even suppose, just for the sake of argument, that you believe in a soul. A person born with a good soul or an evil soul isn’t free; they didn’t create themselves or their soul. They aren’t responsible for their personality, their likes and dislikes, their preferences, their decisions, or anything about themselves. Even if they read self-help books and “choose” radical self-improvement, that decision is still caused by interactions between their character and their environment. You don’t need neuroscience to see any of this, though the details just become more material and obvious when you do. When you substitute large neural populations at the relevant spatial scale for a human soul, nothing actually changes.

Finally, Hoel argues that viewing free will as an illusion is bad for us, citing a 2016 study by Crescioni and colleagues which reported, in Hoel’s words, that “the belief in free will has been correlated with … a greater tendency to forgive”. I have a very different intuition – if I believe that someone who has wronged me could have done otherwise, why would I be more likely to forgive them? So I looked into the literature and found that a 2023 metaanalysis which included the study in question, alongside over a hundred other studies, found no evidence for these negative psychological effects stemming from free will skepticism. Like Sam Harris, I think that relinquishing the belief in free will is far from nihilistic and likely has a net positive effect on our ethics: we are more likely to feel compassion for others, as they couldn’t have done differently, and more likely to feel connected to the world around us, as we don’t exist as a separate free agent outside its causal structure. In other words, it relaxes another illusion, the illusion of self.

Unlike Erik Hoel, Sam Harris (host of the Making Sense podcast and a book of conversations with the same title) argues that free will is an illusion.

Conclusion

For me, The World Behind the World offers just the right balance of material to agree and disagree with to make it an exceptionally enjoyable read (after all, too much of either is boring). I hope Hoel writes more books in the near future, and in the meanwhile, I’ll be reading his novel, The Revelations, and continuing to follow his Substack newsletter, The Intrinsic Perspective.

Stella Dorrestein (pictured) is a medical doctor currently pursuing a PhD in psychopharmacology at the Centre for Human Drug Research in Leiden, the Netherlands while researching new drugs for psychiatric disorders. She is interested in psychedelic substances like DMT and ketamine which are receiving thorough investigation for their potential applications in treating conditions such as depression, with promising results.

Writing and photos by Joel Frohlich.

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fetal brain complexity decreases at birth

Surprising new research reveals how fetal brain complexity declines before and after birth

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Sex differences in prenatal development of neural complexity in the human brain

Sex differences in prenatal development of neural complexity in the human brain

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Frohlich, J., Moser, J., Sippel, K., Mediano, P. a. M., Preissl, H., & Gharabaghi, A. (2024). Sex differences in prenatal development of neural complexity in the human brain. Nature Mental Health. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-024-00206-4

Frohlich, Joel, Julia Moser, Katrin Sippel, et al. “Sex differences in prenatal development of neural complexity in the human brain.” Nature Mental Health, Feb. 2024, doi:10.1038/s44220-024-00206-4.

@article{Frohlich_Moser_Sippel_Mediano_Preissl_Gharabaghi_2024, title={Sex differences in prenatal development of neural complexity in the human brain}, url={https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-024-00206-4}, DOI={10.1038/s44220-024-00206-4}, journal={Nature Mental Health}, author={Frohlich, Joel and Moser, Julia and Sippel, Katrin and Mediano, Pedro a. M. and Preissl, Hubert and Gharabaghi, Alireza}, year={2024}, month=feb }

Fetal Brain Complexity: New Research Challenges Expectations

Even as birth nears, the complexity of brain activity decreases with fetal maturation and continues to decline after birth, according to results recently published in Nature Mental Health by a research team with key contributors from the University of Tuebingen, Germany and led by Dr. Joel Frohlich, who also serves as a research consultant for the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies in addition to his postdoctoral position in Tuebingen.

Sex Differences in Fetal Brain Development: A Surprising Finding

More surprising still, male and female fetuses show different changes in complexity, with boys declining faster than girls. According to the authors, the study’s findings carry important implications for future efforts to develop predictive biomarkers of psychiatric disorders based on the complexity of brain activity recorded before birth.

Investigating Fetal Brain Activity with MEG

The published manuscript, titled “Sex differences in prenatal development of neural complexity in the human brain”, was sparked by a two-year interdisciplinary collaboration between the laboratories of University of Tuebingen professors Alireza Gharabaghi and Hubert Preissl, with Frohlich serving liaison between the respective labs. Prof. Gharabaghi leads Tuebingen’s Institute for Neuromodulation and Neurotechnology, whose mission to develop new brain stimulation techniques led the institute to consider how sensory stimulation could be safely applied to investigate neural integrity in fetuses and infants, much in the same manner as electromagnetic brain stimulation is currently used in adults. When the collaboration began, Prof. Preissl, director of Tuebingen’s fMEG Center, had already supervised relevant experiments conducted by Dr. Julia Moser (now at the University of Minnesota) and Dr. Katrin Sippel, which gave the team the data they were looking for.

Fetal brain activity has already revealed evidence of learning before birth

The team used magnetoencephalography or MEG (a technology for detecting weak magnetic activity in the brain) to record neural signals non-invasively from third trimester fetuses and newborns. These signals were responses to sequences of auditory tones, which included patterns that were occasionally broken to test if fetuses (and, later, newborn infants) had successfully learned the original sequence. Two earlier research manuscripts, led by Moser, examined these data in the context of fetal and newborn learning and revealed evidence that fetuses respond to pattern violations as early as 35 weeks gestation, late in the third trimester of pregnancy. “Sensory stimulation provides us with a unique opportunity to observe how young brains process information from the outside. And all in a completely safe way,” explained Prof. Preissl in a recent press release.

In the current manuscript, the research team then applied several different algorithms to estimate the complexity of the MEG signals using entropy, or the number of possible ways in which states of the signal can be arranged. Some of these algorithms work by determining how difficult it is to compress the signal, as more complex data are harder to compress. To understand this better, consider the compressed size of two image files on your computer, one depicting a Vermeer painting and the other depicting a Rothko painting. The more complex image (Vermeer) will be harder to compress into a small file. Similarly, more complex brain signals are harder to compress, allowing scientists to estimate their entropy.

A pregnant woman positioning the fetus into the MEG.

Surprising results from fetal brain activity

The researchers originally hypothesized that fetal brain activity would grow more complex with maturation. To their surprise, the opposite occurred. “Intuitively, I had thought that as the brain matures, its activity should grow more complex just as its anatomy and function grows more complex,” said Frohlich. “In hindsight though, it makes a decent amount of sense, especially considering the fact that we recorded brain activity evoked by sensory signals, rather than spontaneous activity.” As the brain develops, it moves away from random patterns toward more ordered modes of activity sculpted by emerging synaptic connections. These connections constrain the number of ways in which the brain can respond to stimuli such as the auditory patterns in the experiment. This is likely why more mature fetal brains showed less complex activity in their responses: these brains had fewer ways of responding to the same stimulus, and thus lower complexity. According to Frohlich, if the experiment had instead looked at spontaneous brain activity in the absence of stimuli, the results might have been different.

Crucial to the team’s conclusions were contributions from Imperial College London professor Pedro Mediano, who shared a sophisticated mathematical algorithm which allowed the team to determine which properties of the fetal brain signals were driving the decrease in their complexity. Using Mediano’s approach, the team found that changes in the amplitude or “strength” of the signal were related to the decreasing complexity. In fact, the effect of amplitude appeared to mask changes caused by another property of the signal, phase, which opposed complexity by driving increases in complexity with maturation. The presence of two opposing processes might partially explain the team’s surprising results with respect to maturation.

However, the effects of fetal sex are still leaving the team slightly puzzled. “I didn’t expect fetal sex to have any impact on neural complexity,” said Frohlich, “but it’s possible that this relates to the greater vulnerability of the male brain during gestation, as many neurodevelopmental disorders, like autism and ADHD, are diagnosed more frequently in boys.” Frohlich is inspired by earlier studies that have linked the complexity of neural activity to brain health, including one previous study which predicted the onset of autism years later from brain activity recorded in young infants. Neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism are best prevented very early in life while the brain is still highly plastic, which creates a need for early detection of risk. “The earlier we identify the risk of developing neuropsychiatric and metabolic disorders, the more effectively we can support brain development to prevent serious illness,” explained Prof. Gharabaghi in a press release.

Looking toward the future

According to Frohlich, whose 2018 PhD dissertation focused on biomarkers of neurodevelopmental disorders, the next step in this line of work will be to follow fetuses several years after birth to see whether the complexity of their fetal brain activity predicts later outcomes such as autism or ADHD. “For example, you could recruit pregnant women who already have a child with autism, which means that the fetus has some familial risk of also developing it. By recording brain activity from the fetus and then following up with the family three years later, you could see if the complexity of prenatal brain activity is predictive of an eventual diagnosis.”

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is cannabis psychedelic? Kind of!

Is Cannabis Psychedelic?

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Is Cannabis Psychedlic?

Neural complexity is increased after low doses of LSD, but not moderate to high doses of oral THC or methamphetamine

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Murray, C. H., Frohlich, J., Haggarty, C. J., Tare, I., Lee, R., & De Wit, H. (2024). Neural Complexity Is Increased After Low Doses of LSD, but Not Moderate to High Doses of Oral THC or Methamphetamine. Neuropsychopharmacology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-024-01809-2

“Neural Complexity Is Increased After Low Doses of LSD, but Not Moderate to High Doses of Oral THC or Methamphetamine.” Neuropsychopharmacology, Jan. 2024, doi:10.1038/s41386-024-01809-2.

@article{Murray_Frohlich_Haggarty_Tare_Lee_De Wit_2024b, title={Neural Complexity Is Increased After Low Doses of LSD, but Not Moderate to High Doses of Oral THC or Methamphetamine}, url={https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-024-01809-2}, DOI={10.1038/s41386-024-01809-2}, journal={Neuropsychopharmacology}, author={Murray, Conor H. and Frohlich, Joel and Haggarty, Connor J. and Tare, Ilaria and Lee, Royce and De Wit, Harriet}, year={2024}, month=jan }

Cannabis and the Psychedelic: A Historical Perspective

In 1857, the American writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow described his experiences with hashish in his memoir The Hasheesh Eater: Being Passages from the Life of a Pythagorean:

“It is this process of symbolization which, in certain hasheesh states, gives every tree and house, every pebble and leaf, every footprint, feature, and gesture, a significance beyond mere matter or form, which possesses an inconceivable force of tortures or of happiness.”

Delving into Terminology: What Does “Psychedelic” Really Mean?

For Ludlow, hashish infused meaning into everyday objects; his experiences seemed to reveal new parts of the mind, with either blissful or terrifying effects. In 1956, the psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond coined a term to encapsulate such “mind-manifesting” phenomena: psychedelic. Both then and now, the term is mostly applied to drugs like LSD that powerfully alter one’s perception through their action at a specific neurotransmitter receptor called 5HT2a, which receives signals from serotonin, one of the brain’s main chemical messengers. These “classic psychedelics” have a very different pharmacology than tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main active chemical in cannabis. Unlike LSD and the so-called “classic psychedelics”, THC acts similarly to a different class of neurotransmitters called endocannabinoids, which send signals “backwards” across synapses in the brain to regulate neuronal firing. The effects of THC include changes in perception, appetite, and mood; “inconceivable force of tortures or of happiness” as Ludlow described it. But, is this experience “psychedelic”?

Let’s consider the classic psychedelics, like LSD and psilocybin, the main active compound in magic mushrooms. A well known effect of these psychedelics is an increase in the complexity or “diversity” of neural activity. According to one theory, brain complexity during the psychedelic state reflects the increased richness of subjective experience. In short, your experience of the world becomes more complex on psychedelics, and so to does the electrical activity of your cerebral cortex.

The Science of Psychedelic Effects: THC vs. Classic Psychedelics

Recently published work led by my collaborator Conor Murray at UCLA investigated whether oral THC would also increase neural complexity. While at the University of Chicago, Murray and his colleagues recorded electrical brain activity using a non-invasive technology called EEG while one group of healthy volunteers took THC in pill form and another group took a tiny “microdose” of the classic psychedelic LSD in another session (a microdose here means a tiny dose with barely noticeable effects). Note that this THC pill contained synthetic THC, or Marinol, rather than extract from the cannabis plant. Marinol doesn’t contain other cannabis compounds like CBD, and so its effects may be different from those of real cannabis products. Furthermore, some individuals have a genetic background which impairs their liver’s ability to metabolize THC, and these people will be more impacted by oral THC than smoked or vaped THC.  

To also examine how LSD and oral THC compared to a stimulant drug that lacks perception-altering effects, the University of Chicago researchers gave a third group of healthy volunteers a medical preparation of methamphetamine. This medical preparation, similar to what is occasionally prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or ADHD, isn’t smoked like “crystal meth”, the drug’s street form, but it still has powerful effects on alertness and attention. For all drugs given in the laboratory—THC, LSD, and methamphetamine—some volunteers took the real drug while others took an inactive placebo.

So, how did these drugs affect the volunteers? When asked how much they felt the drug effect, volunteers felt the most “high” during the THC session, something like a solid 6 or 7 if rated on a scale out of 10. Both the methamphetamine and LSD drug effects were weaker, which isn’t too surprising given that the LSD was only given as a microdose. Furthermore, both THC and LSD increased anxiety, though this effect was stronger in the case of THC.

Exploring Neural Complexity: Does THC Alter Brain Activity Like Psychedelics?

But what about effects on brain activity? I contributed to the study by guiding an analysis of neural complexity. Surprisingly, when each drug’s effect on neural complexity was compared with a placebo, only LSD caused a statistically significant increase in the complexity of brain activity. THC simply did not alter the complexity of EEG signals at significant level, and the small effects it did exert were a mixture of increases and decreases at different EEG sensors.

Psychedelic, or Not? Subjectivity Matters

So, does this mean that oral THC and edible cannabis products aren’t psychedelic? Not so fast. First of all, the changes in complexity observed with LSD didn’t correlate with the drug’s subjective effects, which suggests that the diversity of neural signals changes even before strong effects in one’s mental experience occur. However, this might have been different if participants had been given a larger, “macrodose” of LSD, as other studies have found correlation between neural complexity and the felt effects of macrodosed psychedelics.

Additionally, it’s important to remember that volunteers took Marinol, which lacks the other natural chemicals or “cannabinoids” found in the cannabis plant, such as CBD. Although the main effects of cannabis are exerted by THC, it’s possible that THC also interacts with other cannabinoids, which alter its effects. In other words, a different study using extracts from the cannabis plant might have yielded different results.

is cannabis psychedelic? -- man sits with blindfold after using cannabis surrounded by candlelights.

The Potential Role of Cannabis in Psychedelic Therapy

But finally, and most importantly, we need to remember what the word psychedelic means: to manifest the mind. Many experiences, including some that don’t involve any drugs, reveal hidden aspects of the mind, including meditation, breathwork, and floating in a sensory reduction float tank. In the case of meditation, it’s somewhat unclear whether this activity is accompanied by increases or decreases in neural complexity. But as far as a psychedelic quality is concerned, the ground truth in each case is whatever a person reports: if experiences with meditation or cannabis seems to manifest hidden aspects of the mind, then why can’t we call these experiences psychedelic?

Nonetheless, I think Murray’s recent EEG study of THC has important implications for psychedelic therapy. Psychotherapy, assisted by classic psychedelic compounds like LSD and psilocybin, is now being studied in many countries as a treatment for depression, addiction, and anxiety surrounding terminal illness. All clinical trials must compare these compounds to an inactive placebo (a pill with no effects) to determine if any benefit the patient experiences is really due to the drug or just due to what the patient expects will happen, a self-fulfilling prophesy of sorts. Because most psychiatric drugs have rather subtle effects—you don’t really notice much after popping a Prozac pill—placebo controlled trials generally work well. Classic psychedelics like LSD, on the other hand, have extremely obvious effects—participants know when they’re assigned to the placebo group, which alters their expectations of whether their symptoms will improve.

One solution to this problem would be to use an active placebo—a compound with noticeable, yet different, effects than a classic psychedelic drug like LSD. An active placebo would be as similar as possible to LSD without actually sharing its possible therapeutic properties. Drugs that act at the 5HT2a receptor, like LSD and psilocybin, are not merely psychedelic; they also increase the brain’s capacity to change and rewire itself, which is likely key to their ability to help pull people out of depression. In this context, the drugs are known as “psychoplastogens”. Cannabis, on the other hand, is not a psychoplastogen—as bizarre as a given experience with cannabis may be, it is unlikely to trigger massive rewiring of the brain comparable to changes induced by LSD. And yet, it may cause strong alternations in perception, which follow a long time course when taken orally (as a pill or edible) similar to classic psychedelics, often needing up to an hour or two to start after the oral dose is consumed. This might make cannabis a better comparison in psychedelic drug trials than a simple, inactive placebo. In such a trial, it would be less obvious to participants which treatment they had been assigned to, helping to control for expectancy effects.

Regardless of whether neural complexity changes track how psychedelic a substance feels, its specificity to LSD in Murray’s study suggests that it might be a biomarker specific to effects caused by LSD and not THC. If future studies show that neural complexity tracks some therapeutic property of LSD that THC lacks, then clinical trials of psychoplastogens might use neural complexity to differentiate between effects of the treatment versus another psychoactive drug used as a control, like oral THC. This idea is supported by the fact that ketamine, another psychoplastogen with antidepressant properties (albeit one that does not act at 5HT2a receptors) is also known to increase neural complexity.

Defining ‘Psychedelic’ and the Importance of Respectful Use

At the end of the day, the question of whether cannabis, edible or otherwise, is “psychedelic” is really a matter of semantics—how do we define psychedelic? And whether or not it’s regarded as psychedelic, THC shows both important differences and similarities with classic psychedelics like LSD. While these drugs have different uses and risks, THC may be comparable enough with classic psychedelics to serve the much needed purpose of providing a psychoactive control in psychedelic therapy.

Finally, whether or not you consider cannabis to be psychedelic, it and other psychoactive substances should be treated with respect and caution. Drugs discussed in this article have the ability to alter the mind, which, depending on the context and intentions behind their use, can be either therapeutic or harmful.

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infant consciousness in the lab

New research sheds fresh light on mystery of infant consciousness

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Consciousness in the cradle: on the emergence of infant experience

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Bayne, T., Frohlich, J., Cusack, R., Moser, J., & Naci, L. (2023). Consciousness in the cradle: on the emergence of infant experience. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Bayne, Tim, et al. “Consciousness in the cradle: on the emergence of infant experience.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2023).

@article{bayne2023consciousness, title={Consciousness in the cradle: on the emergence of infant experience}, author={Bayne, Tim and Frohlich, Joel and Cusack, Rhodri and Moser, Julia and Naci, Lorina}, journal={Trends in Cognitive Sciences}, year={2023}, publisher={Elsevier} }

New research sheds fresh light on mystery of infant consciousness

When does consciousness begin? There is evidence that some form of conscious experience is present by birth, and perhaps even in late pregnancy, an international team of researchers led by Tim Bayne of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and Joel Frohlich of the University of Tuebingen in Germany and the US-based Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies in Santa Monica, California has concluded in a new review manuscript. The findings, just published in the peer-reviewed journal ‘Trends in Cognitive Science’, have important clinical, ethical, and potentially legal implications, according to the authors.

In the study, entitled ‘Consciousness in the cradle: on the emergence of infant experience’, the researchers argue that, by birth, the infant’s developing brain is likely capable of conscious experiences. Although each of us was once a baby, infant consciousness remains mysterious, because infants cannot tell us what they think or feel, explains one of the two lead authors of the paper Dr. Tim Bayne, Professor of Philosophy at Monash University. 

“Nearly everyone who has held a newborn infant has wondered what, if anything, it is like to be a baby. But of course we cannot remember our infancy, and consciousness researchers have disagreed on whether consciousness arises ‘early’ (at birth or shortly after) or ‘late’ ­– by one year of age, or even much later.”

To provide a new perspective on when consciousness first emerges, the team reviewed recent advances in consciousness science. In adults, some markers from brain imaging have been found to reliably differentiate consciousness from its absence, and are increasingly applied in science and medicine. This is the first time that these advances, as translated to infants, have been reviewed in detail.

Co-author of the study, Dr. Lorina Naci, Associate Professor at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, who leads the ‘Consciousness and Cognition Group’, explained: “Our findings suggest that newborns can integrate sensory and developing cognitive responses into coherent conscious experiences to understand the actions of others and plan their own responses.”

It is even possible that birth itself triggers the onset of consciousness. “Probably the first thing the newborn infant realizes is that the outside world is very unpredictable relative to the womb environment,” explained co-lead author and postdoctoral researcher  Dr. Joel Frohlich. “Things are constantly changing, and so the newborn must build a mental model of the world to adapt and predict things.” 

However, the authors don’t rule out the possibility that consciousness might already start some weeks beforehand.  “Julia Moser’s work shows that third-trimester fetuses appear to be capable of learning sequences of auditory beeps,” said Dr. Frohlich, referring to his co-author Dr. Moser at the University of Minnesota. “When an auditory tone deviates from a pattern established earlier in the experiment, the fetus shows this ‘surprise’ response in its magnetic brain activity. The neural activity shows a field deflection as if the fetus is saying ‘huh?’.”

The paper also sheds light into ‘what it is like’ to be a baby. We know that seeing is much more immature in babies than hearing, for example (see the image below for a theoretical depiction). Furthermore, this work suggests that, at any point in time, infants are aware of fewer items than adults, and can take longer to grasp what’s in front of them, but they can easily process more diverse information, such as sounds from other languages, than their older selves. 

infant consciousness differences in perception

“Infants can perceive many things which adults cannot, like the differences between vowel sounds in a foreign language,” explained Dr. Joel Frohlich. “By 10 months or so, we lose this ability as the brain decides these perceptual differences are no longer relevant and discards them.” 

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The Consciousness Compass

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The Consciousness Compass

Edited by GPT 4. Illustrated by MidJourney. What does this mean? See Afterword below.

 

"What the hell is ‘a common denominator of consciousness’”? you ask me.

We’re in a café in the city on a rainy day. You’ve just opened my new paper on your laptop, recently published in the peer-reviewed Nature Portfolio journal Biology Communications. I crack my neck, pause for a beat, and then ask you a question.

“Would a ‘consciousness compass’ make more sense?”

You shake your head no. What the hell is he talking about, you’re thinking. Okay. I’m ready for that.

“Let’s put these on,” I say, and I pull two virtual reality head-mounted displays along with haptic suits and place them on the table.

“Seriously?” you ask.

“It’s easier to show you,” I say.

We both strap the haptic suits and VR headsets on, and in a flash, we’re suddenly whisked away to … somewhere. The landscape is naked rocks in every direction and the sky is a cloudless blue. It looks sweltering hot, you think, and you’re glad we’re only in VR. Occasionally, a shrub or a small cactus dares to peak out from behind a boulder. Why are we here, peaking out too?

“Joshua Tree?” your avatar asks me. Bingo. It’s a National Park we’ve both visited a dozen times. But off trail, everything starts to look the same. Rocks and boulders in every direction. I pull a compass from my pocket.

“If we want to get back to the campsite, we just need a map and a compass.”

“I know how a compass works,” you say, rolling your eyes.

I pull the simple gadget from my pocket. It renders nicely in VR, wobbling a little bit as I steer it around in my hand. I point in the direction of the compass needle.

“So this way is north, right?”

You cock your eyebrow. “Well, yeah. I don’t need to be a boy scout to know that.” What am I getting at?

“It’s almost north,” I say, “but not quite. Magnetic north isn’t true north. There’s a bias.” I snap my fingers and away we go again.

We’re on the edge of a fjord, glaciers blanketing the land around us, icebergs drifting by. You didn’t bring a jacket, and you’re still glad that you can't feel the temperature in VR.

“We’re in Nunavut, Canada. Can you get us to the north pole?” I ask, handing you the compass.

“I get it,” you say, “I know. Earth’s magnetic pole doesn’t align with the geographic pole. The compass is less useful now because we’re already so close to the location where the two poles diverge.”

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“You got it,” I said. “And what’s more,” I add, “the north magnetic pole is constantly drifting by many kilometers each year. It’s worse than just being a little off from the north geographic pole: it’s a moving target. If you use it as an approximation of the north geographic pole, the error isn’t constant: it’s always changing.”

You do a sarcastic slow clap. Even in VR, your avatar is expressive. What does this have to do with the Communications Biology paper?

“Let’s try one more place,” I say, and with a quick nod, we’re back in the desert again. But this time, the desert is different. The soil is much redder and entirely devoid of vegetation. The sky is clear again, but now a surreal pink rather than a serene blue. You look toward the horizon, and it almost looks like the moon is rising … but it’s much too small, and rising much too fast, with a strange potato shape, not a glorious lunar disc.

“We’re on Mars?” you ask.

“Yes, time for Phobos to rise,” I say, referring to the larger of Mars’ two moons. “I would almost say it’s my favorite time of day … but actually, it happens twice a day.”

“What are we doing here?”

I hand you the compass. Your spacesuited avatar takes it and gives it a hard look.

“The needle is taking a while to settle. But if the moon is rising—I mean, if Phobos is rising—then that direction must be east,” you say pointing toward the Phobos-rise.

“Not so fast. Phobos orbits faster than Mars rotates—it rises in the west and sets in the east.”

“Fine, west then. But anyway, why won’t the compass work? It’s still just spinning.”

“There’s the rub,” I say. “There’s no global magnetic field on Mars. Nothing to directly tell us which way is north. Plenty of iron rocks to confuse the needle though.”

“Okay, you got me. What’s your point?”

I take the compass from you and toss it in the Martian dirt. “What we need,” I say, “is a universal compass. A compass that points north under all circumstances, no matter where we are. A compass to guide us just as reliably in Canada as in California, just as reliably on Mars as on Earth.”

You shrug. “I think a normal compass works just fine most of the time. How often are we really going to be exploring the Artic or crawling around on Mars?”

“But that is exactly when we need a compass the most,” I retort. “When we are off exploring, in the unknown. When the world is familiar, we can get our bearings easily. But on the frontiers, there are few things worth more than a reliable compass.”

“Okay, I get it. When we’re in a new place, we can’t rely on familiar landmarks.”

“Yes,” I say, and I know there’s no smile rendering through my opaque spacesuit visor, but you can feel my grin. “And so it is too, with consciousness. When brain dynamics are familiar—the same old familiar activity that neuroscientists and neurologists see each time electrodes are placed on the scalp to record electrical brain activity or EEG—that’s when you hardly need a compass. After all, you know that large, highly synchronized, slowly oscillating brain waves indicate deep sleep or unconsciousness. And you know, equally well, that low amplitude, desynchronized, fast brain waves indicate consciousness, either as wakefulness or dreaming.”

You nod and take off your space helmet. “I’m glad we’re in VR,” you say, looking around with your bare eyes. “Why are we wearing these things anyway? We don’t need oxygen.”

“Are you paying attention?”

“Yeah, just a little distracted. I mean, we’re on freakin’ Mars.”

I snap my fingers, and again, we’re in a beautiful place again, but this time teaming with life and people. We gaze out the window from the fifth floor of an office building in Santa Monica. Palm trees dot the busy street outside. Off in the distance, to the south (yes, the compass works again!) a plane lands at LAX, and further west, you see the U.S. Bank Tower, Wilshire Grand Center, and other jewels in the skyline of downtown LA. Santa Monica Beach is somewhere just around the next city block. Mars, on the other hand, is now over 100 million kilometers away.

“Where am I?” you ask. Behind us, a young man in a plaid shirt steps out of his office. “Who are you?”

“I’m Nicco Reggente, welcome to IACS!” he answers with a smile as he grabs a kombucha from the fridge. You slowly scan the office space and catch a glimpse of me—a year or so younger—coding away on a laptop.

“Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies,” I clarify. “This is where I wrapped up the project, sitting over there, running surrogate data simulations.”

You look lost, and I realize I’ve gotten ahead of myself.

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"So, back to consciousness," I continue, "just like with the compass, when we venture into unfamiliar territories, we need a more reliable way to measure consciousness. The familiar landmarks and patterns of brain activity can only take us so far. In cases of severe brain injury, anesthetic drugs, or genetic disorders, we need a 'common denominator of consciousness' to guide us."

You nod, taking in the view of the bustling cityscape. "Alright, I get it now. You're saying that we need a 'consciousness compass' to help us navigate these uncharted territories where EEG brain waves lose their usual meaning. Once the brain is lesioned or challenged by drugs, EEG waves begin to behave strangely and all bets are off.”

"Exactly," I say. "The 'common denominator of consciousness' is a compass that can guide us through the complex landscape of profoundly altered brain activity. In a nutshell, what we want to know is whether a person is still experiencing themselves or the world around them, regardless of whether they have the capacity to respond to tasks or questions.”

You take a seat in a chair, contemplating my idea. "Okay, I think I got the gist of it,” you say with a nod.

I lift my finger and say “Let’s consider some of the traumatic brain injury patients at the UCLA Medical Center”

 “Can we not teleport this time? I just sat down.”

“It’s just a bit down Wilshire actually, but okay, as you wish,” I say with a grin, also taking a seat across from you. “The patients in the intensive care unit at the hospital are often unresponsive, so we can’t simply ask them ‘are you conscious?’. And because of their severe brain injuries, it’s not clear what their EEG oscillations mean. A doctor might see slow waves on a patient’s EEG and assume this means the patient is unconscious But these slow waves could also be the ‘loud scream’ of a focal brain lesion, appearing everywhere in the EEG recording as electrical signals conduct from this focal lesion to distant regions of the skull and scalp!”

"Right,” you say “I get it, looking at slow waves in these patients might be like relying on a magnetic compass to find north on Mars. But you don’t know for sure which patients are conscious, so how can you develop a better compass from their data?”

“Ah, that’s a big problem with some earlier studies,” I say. “Even if we throw machine learning at lots of data, we often lack the ‘ground truth’ which tells us which patients are conscious and which are not. So in my new paper, we don’t look at those patients at all.”

“You don’t?”

“No—instead, we look at children with rare genetic disorders during sleep and wakefulness. We know that these children are conscious when they are awake, just like you and me. And we know that they are probably experiencing nothing during the ‘non-REM’ stage of sleep, where vivid dreams are unlikely. That’s our ground truth. But, a bit like other neurological patients, these children have unusual EEG patterns. In one disorder, called Angelman syndrome, the children show slow EEG activity resembling sleep during wakefulness. And in another disorder, called Dup15q syndrome, the children show fast EEG activity, almost resembling wakefulness, during non-REM sleep.”

I see the lightbulb flash in your eyes, and finally, this long trek through VR feels worth it. “So whatever EEG patterns reliably indicate consciousness in these children, despite their abnormal EEGs, those patterns are the common denominator of consciousness we might want to use as our compass!”

“You got it! And lastly, we also look at healthy, typically developing children to make sure that those patterns generalize to them, also indicating consciousness in normal EEGs.”

"All right, so what did you find?" you ask, genuinely intrigued now.

"We found that a particular family of measures, called entropy, were the most reliable indicators of consciousness in both the children with genetic disorders and typically developing children," I explain.

“Entropy … isn’t that something from physics?”

“Right, physicists like to talk about entropy as the number of possible ways to arrange a system or signal, kind of like ‘disorder’. In EEG, entropy measures show us how complex the signals are. It’s low when the signal is highly regular and predictable, and it’s high when the signal is irregular and unpredictable. Overall, entropy appears to be much more reliable in identifying conscious brain activity than traditional EEG measures based on amplitude and frequency.”

You lean back, processing the information. "So, in a way, you've discovered a 'compass' that points to consciousness, regardless of the brain's individual quirks or injuries. It's like a universal compass that works on Earth and Mars, even when the magnetic poles are shifted or absent."

"Exactly," I say with a smile. "This 'common denominator of consciousness' could help doctors and researchers identify consciousness in unresponsive patients, even when it’s masked by unusual EEG patterns. It's a step toward better understanding and treating severely brain-injured patients, like those in the intensive care unit at UCLA, and making sure that we don’t misdiagnose someone with a ‘vegetative state’ just because they can’t respond to our questions. Ultimately, it might also reveal something about the mechanisms of subjective experience, as many neuroscientists think that neural complexity is foundational to consciousness itself.”

The sun begins to set outside the window, casting a warm glow across the room. You take a deep breath and look back at me. "Well, it looks like I've got some reading to do. This paper of yours just got a lot more interesting."

With that, we remove our VR headsets and haptic suits, returning to the familiar surroundings of the café. But as my eyes focus again, I see the café manager walking toward us, looking none too happy.

“Excuse me," he says sternly, "this is a café, not a VR gaming center. You’ve knocked over enough glasses and chairs. Please pack up your equipment and take your drinks."

Embarrassed, we quickly apologize and start to gather our things. As we sip our now lukewarm coffees, you glance over at me, a mirthful smile playing at the corner of your lips.

And so, we continue our search for the common denominators of consciousness and life, one spilled coffee at a time.

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Afterword: Using generative AI as a copilot

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) assisted with the production of this blog post, from GPT 4 suggesting what should come next in the story, to Midjourney version 5 generating custom illustrations to accompany the text. The past several months have seen enormous advances in AI and, as of this writing, the future role of generative AI as a “copilot” in activities ranging from writing to coding remains uncertain. Five years from now, transparency statements such as this one may be completely unnecessary, just as you feel no obligation to disclose having used the spell checker in your word processor. Or, perhaps society will shun generative AI tools for spoiling creative work and taking fulfilling jobs away from humans. Either possibility feels plausible at this point. We are truly in terra incognita.

So, how exactly did generative AI assist with the production of this blog post? Midjourney’s role is obvious—I have no artistic talent in visual art, and so AI art programs like Midjourney are really the only option for me to illustrate a casual blogpost with no budget. But the player you’re probably really wondering about is GPT 4—what role did this quasi-AGI play in my blog post?

For the first half of my writing, the answer was, none whatsoever. I began writing this idiosyncratic present tense short story to explain my recent Communications Biology publication one morning in February this year when inspiration struck. Then, as tends to happen, I got busy with other things and didn’t revisit my story until two months later.

When I returned to the story in April, the characters had just teleported in VR to Santa Monica. I knew what I wanted to have happen, but writer’s block wouldn’t let me put it down in words. So, I pasted what I had written thus far into ChatGPT and let the GPT 4 model continue my story. Here’s what it suggested:

"So, back to consciousness," I continue, "just like with the compass, when we venture into unfamiliar territories, we need a more reliable way to measure and understand consciousness. The familiar landmarks and patterns of brain activity can only take us so far. With new technologies, artificial intelligence, and novel states of consciousness, we need a 'common denominator of consciousness' to guide us."

You nod, taking in the view of the bustling cityscape. "Alright, I get it now. You're saying that we need a 'consciousness compass' to help us navigate these uncharted territories in neuroscience and beyond."

The GPT 4 story then continues for several more paragraphs, but the dialogue gets increasingly vague, misdirected, and shallow. Still, I like the transition, so I used the first two sentences from GPT 4’s suggestion. And buried a few paragraphs down, there’s a gem that I decide to also use later in my story.

The sun begins to set outside the window, casting a warm glow across the room. You take a deep breath and look back at me. "Well, it looks like I've got some reading to do. This paper of yours just got a lot more interesting."

But after my character finishes explaining the methods of the paper to “you”, I called upon GPT 4’s help again. This time, the dialogue was much more on the mark from a technical perspective.

"Alright, so what did you find?" you ask, genuinely intrigued now.

"We found that a particular measure, called the Lempel-Ziv complexity, was the most reliable indicator of consciousness in both the children with genetic disorders and typically developing children," I explain. "This measure quantifies the complexity of the EEG signal, and it appears to be much more reliable in identifying conscious brain activity than traditional EEG measures like amplitude and frequency."

Wow, I really did use Lempel-Ziv complexity (among other entropy measures) in my paper! And since I hadn’t mentioned Lempel-Ziv yet in the story, this appears to be GPT 4 drawing on its knowledge of the scientific literature to do just what it was designed to do: predict what words should come next in a text (yes, everything else you might use ChatGPT for, like debugging code or tutoring you in a foreign language, is just a side effect). I felt that Lempel-Ziv was a bit too technical for this post—there wasn’t any need to introduce jargon or specific algorithms for estimating entropy—but I nonetheless tweaked some of GPT 4’s dialogue, revising it to fit my vision of the story, and incorporated it into the blog post.

I then called on GPT 4 for help one last time at the conclusion of the story, when the characters reenter the real world. Again, I knew what I wanted to have happen: the characters have wreaked havoc on the café and are duly expelled. After a bit of back and forth with GPT 4, I got the prose that I was looking for, including the last line of the story. I asked GPT 4 to “Make the final line thought provoking and provocative.” The baby AGI gave me five different options, but I took the first one, with just some slight tweaking.

And so, we continue our search for the common denominators of life, one spilled coffee at a time.

So, what is the future role of GPT 4 and large language models in creative writing? Will these generative AIs serve as our virtual editors, suggesting new directions for a story and penning a few of our best lines? Or will we eventually see these tools as the artistic equivalent of performance enhancing drugs—the writer’s version of doping?

Alas, this is one question that GPT 4 cannot answer.

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