Summary: Researchers at Ruhr University Bochum explore why consciousness evolved and why different species developed it in distinct ways. By comparing humans with birds, they show that complex ...

Human consciousness once looked like an evolutionary extravagance, a mysterious inner movie with no clear purpose. Now a wave ...

People have long pondered what consciousness actually is. Consciousness seems very different from other biological functions—like some sort of nonmaterial essence within our heads. Thoughts and ...

What does it mean to be conscious? People have been thinking and writing about this question for millennia. Yet many things about the conscious mind remain a mystery, including how to measure and ...

Consciousness is the ultimate question of existence. Nothing is more essential than our experience. Yet we have no consensus, and perhaps no clue, about what it actually is. The trouble, in part, is ...

Christof Koch, PhD, is a physicist who has made a career out of empirically studying consciousness. When Koch began to study consciousness 35 years ago, people thought it couldn’t be done by ...