At the risk of appearing to support quantum consciousness...it sure looks like consciousness is about as hard to study as a quantum particle, and for somehow similar reasons.
For a quantum-entangled proton, the moment you "observe" it, even if that observation is a single photon of light needed to detect the entangled proton, the moment you hit it with your detector-photon, you irreversibly change the entangled photon. Schrödinger's cat is both dead and alive only until you open the box to look. Then it's either one or the other, but not both.
Another way of saying this is that quantum experiments are so sensitive, that the measurer (you and your measuring device) must be part of the measurement. But this logically impossible, albeit fun to think about, and to think about thinking about.
Research on consciousness is something like this. If you design a study to investigate a particular theory, the study itself will help to prove that theory. But if you try to investigate a different and competing theory, the study will prove that theory instead. And so on.
The nature of consciousness experiments found to largely determine their results
Mar 2022, phys.org
"Moreover, when you put together all of the findings that were reported in these experiments, it seems like almost the entire brain is involved in creating the conscious experience, which is not consistent with any of the theories. In other words, it would appear that the real picture is larger and more complex than any of the existing theories suggest. It would seem that none of them is consistent with the data, when aggregated across studies, and that the truth lies somewhere in the middle."
Also, and most importantly, remember this whenever you see other studies on consciousness.
via Tel-Aviv University: Itay Yaron et al, The ConTraSt database for analysing and comparing empirical studies of consciousness theories, Nature Human Behaviour (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-021-01284-5
Same goes for studies on brains in general:
For accuracy, brain studies of complex behavior require thousands of people
Mar 2022, phys.org
The results of most studies are unreliable because they involved too few participants.Using publicly available data sets—involving a total of nearly 50,000 participants—the researchers analyzed a range of sample sizes and found that brainwide association studies need thousands of individuals to achieve higher reproducibility. Typical brainwide association studies enroll just a couple dozen people.Such so-called underpowered studies are susceptible to uncovering strong but spurious associations by chance while missing real but weaker associations. Routinely underpowered brainwide association studies result in a glut of astonishingly strong yet irreproducible findings that slow progress toward understanding how the brain works, the researchers said.
But don't despair just yet:
"The field of genomics discovered a similar problem about a decade ago with genomic data and took steps to address it. The NIH (National Institutes of Health) began funding larger data-collection efforts and mandating that data must be shared publicly, which reduces bias and as a result, genome science has gotten much better. Sometimes you just have to change the research paradigm. Genomics has shown us the way."
via Washington University School of Medicine: Scott Marek, Reproducible brain-wide association studies require thousands of individuals, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04492-9
Partially related image credit: Spherical Black Hole with Thin Accretion Disk, Jean-Pierre Luminet, 1979
Something something consciousness study:
Largest ever psychedelics study maps changes of conscious awareness to neurotransmitter systems
Mar 2022, phys.org
Interesting because they use words, by way of testimonials, and a good dose of machine learning:
The researchers gathered 6,850 testimonials from people who took a range of 27 different psychedelic drugs. In a first-of-its-kind approach, they designed a machine learning strategy to extract commonly used words from the testimonials and link them with the neurotransmitter receptors that likely induced them. The interdisciplinary team could then associate the subjective experiences with brain regions where the receptor combinations are most commonly found—these turned out to be the lowest and some of the deepest layers of the brain's information processing layers.
via McGill University: Galen Ballentine et al, Trips and neurotransmitters: Discovering principled patterns across 6850 hallucinogenic experiences, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abl6989.
Post Script on the Nature of Unreliability:
New maps show airplane contrails over the US dropped steeply in 2020
Mar 2022, phys.org
I'm not adding this here because of the drop in contrails. I'm adding it because today I learned:
About half of the aviation industry's contribution to global warming comes directly from planes' carbon dioxide emissions. The other half is thought to be a consequence of their contrails. The signature white tails are produced when a plane's hot, humid exhaust mixes with cool humid air high in the atmosphere. Emitted in thin lines, contrails quickly spread out and can act as blankets that trap the Earth's outgoing heat.
So contrails are bad. But contrails are often confused with chemtrails, which are a popular conspiracy theory. In fact, you can usually guess someone's ability to be a careful thinker by whether they even know the difference between chemtrails and contrails (Not too much different from knowing the difference between astronomy and astrology). Because if you're with someone who's looking at a contrail, and makes some sinister comment about chemtrails, then there's a pretty good chance they also think the government is very intentionally performing multi-generational chemogenetic experiments on the population.
But now I realize that making sinister comments about contrails is totally normal.
via MIT: Vincent R Meijer et al, Contrail coverage over the United States before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, Environmental Research Letters (2022). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ac26f0
Reporting bias makes homeopathy trials look like homeopathy works
Mar 2022, Ars Technica
The Achilles heel of the randomized control trial (RCT) - the meta-study. Yes, apparently, homeopathic proponents, and the like, don't realize that meta-studies exist.
"There's always a bias toward publishing positive results—ones where the treatments have an effect."
The secret? Just don't publish the negative results. Got it.
To deal with that issue, the field has settled on preregistering clinical trials. In these cases, the design of the trial, the outcomes being measured, and other details are placed in a public database before the trial even starts.
via Department for Evidence-based Medicine and Evaluation, Danube University Krems, Austria and RTI International, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina: BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, 2019. DOI: 10.1136/bmjebm-2021-111846
Bonus:
Vitamins, supplements are a 'waste of money' for most Americans
Jun 2022, phys.org
Based on a systematic review of 84 studies, the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) new guidelines state there was "insufficient evidence" that taking multivitamins, paired supplements or single supplements can help prevent cardiovascular disease and cancer in otherwise healthy, non-pregnant adults."The harm is that talking with patients about supplements during the very limited time we get to see them, we're missing out on counseling about how to really reduce cardiovascular risks, like through exercise or smoking cessation," Linder said.
via Northwestern University: Multivitamins and Supplements—Benign Prevention or Potentially Harmful Distraction?, JAMA (2022).
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