Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

"Theories are like toothbrushes," it's sometimes said. "Everybody has their own and nobody wants to use anybody else's." It's a joke, but when it comes to the study of consciousness—the question of ...

Many theories attempt to explain consciousness, but one that’s gaining traction is the idea of electromagnetic (EM) fields—specifically, ephaptic fields—coordinating consciousness in the brain. A new ...

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 ...

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 ...