In a controversial 2025 paper, a researcher proposed a theory that consciousness may give rise to matter—not the other way ...

One scientist’s unorthodox method could finally explain where your “soul” goes when you die, precognition, and everything in ...

The idea that everything that exists can be built from the bottom up has long held sway among physicists. Now, a new kind of ...

A psychedelic experience set author Michael Pollan on a quest to understand consciousness in his new book A World Appears. He ...

Ever since we published our very first issue 123 years ago—yes, we’re old—Popular Mechanics has endeavored to help you understand all kinds of technological marvels, from the tools in your shed, to ...

Richard Dawkins says extended exchanges with Anthropic’s chatbot felt less like software and more like interacting with ...

Consciousness is usually defined by neuroscientists as the ability to have subjective experience, such as the experience of tasting an apple or of seeing the redness of its skin. The leading theories ...

A RECENT GROUNDBREAKING EXPERIMENT in which anesthesia was administered to rats has convinced scientists that tiny structures in the rodents’ brains are responsible for the experience of consciousness ...

These are good times to be a thinking, conscious creature, despite events in the world that might make us doubt that. These are even better times to be a creature who thinks about consciousness: the ...

Is our consciousness continuous, or does it occur in discrete chunks? At first glance, this may seem like a strange question. It seems, to us, that our lives are like a movie, where we are perceiving ...

A leading physicist argues the brain may operate like a quantum system—and that enhancing it could create humans who perceive ...