How consciousness may rely on brain cells acting collectively – new psychedelics research on rats

Psychedelics can help uncover consciousness. agsandrew/Shutterstock Pär Halje, Lund UniversityPsychedelics are known for inducing altered states of consciousness in humans by fundamentally changing our normal pattern of sensory perception, thought and emotion. Research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelics has increased significantly in the last decade. While this research is important, I have always been more intrigued by the idea that psychedelics can be used as a tool to study the neural basis of human consciousness in laboratory animals. We ultimately share the same basic neural hardware with other mammals, and possibly some basic aspects of consciousness, too. So by examining what happens in the brain when there’s a psychedelically induced change in conscious experience, we can perhaps glean insights into what consciousness is in the first place.We still don’t know a lot about how the networks of cells in the brain enable conscious experience. The dominating view is that consciousness somehow emerges as a collective phenomenon when the dispersed information processing of individual neurons (brain cells) is integrated as the cells interact.But the mechanism by which this is supposed to happen remains unclear. Now our study on rats, published in Communications Biology, suggests that psychedelics radically change the...
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How grandmothers' brains react to the sight of their grandchildren

"We're highlighting the brain functions of grandmothers that may play an important role in our social lives and development," says Minwoo Lee, an Emory graduate student and co-author of the study. "It's an important aspect of the human experience that's been largely left out of the field of neuroscience."By Carol Clark: Many people lucky enough to have grown up with doting grandmothers know that they can burnish a child’s development in unique and valuable ways. Now, for the first time, scientists have scanned grandmothers’ brains while they’re viewing photos of their young grandchildren — providing a neural snapshot of this special, inter-generational bond.Proceedings of the Royal Society B published the first study to examine grandmaternal brain function, conducted by researchers at Emory University.“What really jumps out in the data is the activation in areas of the brain associated with emotional empathy,” says James Rilling, lead author and professor in Emory's Department of Anthropology and Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. “That suggests that grandmothers are geared toward feeling what their grandchildren are feeling when they interact with them. If their grandchild is smiling, they’re feeling the child’s joy. And if their grandchild is crying, they’re feeling the child’s pain and distress.”In contrast, the...
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