Head to https://squarespace.com/artem to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ARTEM
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My name is Artem, I’m a neuroscience PhD student at Harvard University.
🌎 Website and Social links: https://kirsanov.ai/
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Physics and phenomenology are usually taken to inhabit different worlds. Physics aims at a description of objective reality in mathematical terms. Phenomenology—the philosophical movement inaugurated by Edmund Husserl—is an a priori investigation into consciousness and into the ways things appear in experience. Physics deals with equations, invariants, and symmetries, aiming to represent reality minus observers; phenomenology seems to concern precisely what physics leaves out: subjectivity, consciousness, meaning. If the two meet at all, it is only in polite, but ultimately inconsequential, interdisciplinary dialogue.
My claim is that this picture is mistaken. Physics does not stand outside phenomenology. It presupposes the very structures phenomenology seeks to analyse—above all, the structured correlation between subject and object through which objectivity first becomes intelligible. The task, therefore, is not to unite two distant domains, but to recognize a relation that has been there from the beginning.
To make this more tangible, consider what physics means by objectivity. Contrary to the image sometimes promoted in popular science—objectivity as detachment from all observers—in spacetime physics, objectivity is defined by invariance across observers. A physical description is deemed objective if it holds regardless of the coordinate frame in which it is expressed.
Elaine Pinggal from Monash University, and colleagues assessed how sleep-like brain activity in awake adults influences sustained attention during a task.
The researchers compared sleep-like brain activity from 32 medication-withdrawn adults with ADHD to 31 neurotypical adults as participants performed a task requiring sustained attention. The findings have been published in JNeurosci.
The ADHD group had more sleep-like brain activity, which was associated with more lapses in attention. Further analyses revealed that this activity may drive the relationship between ADHD and attention problems, including task errors, slower reaction times, and sleepiness.
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My name is Artem, I’m a neuroscience PhD student at Harvard University.
🌎 Website and Social links: https://kirsanov.ai/
📥 \
Head to https://squarespace.com/artem to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ARTEMKIRSANOV
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My name is Artem, I’m a neuroscience PhD student at Harvard University.
🌎 Website and Social links: https://kirsanov.ai/
📥 \
It’s well known that alcohol consumption is an age-old method for coping with stress. But recent research led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst has found that when such self-medication begins in early adulthood, negative cognitive effects start to show up in middle age—even after long periods of total abstinence. The study is published in the journal Alcohol, Clinical and Experimental Research.
These negative effects include a decreased ability to cope with changing situations, an increased likelihood to drink when stressed, and the kinds of cognitive decline associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. The new research helps us understand how alcohol rewires the brain’s circuitry and can help suggest new approaches for helping people adapt to the long-term effects of alcohol use.
Researchers have long known that stress and alcohol have a mutually reinforcing relationship: Alcohol can help take the edge off stressful situations, but in so doing it can decrease the brain’s ability to manage stress on its own, meaning one has to keep drinking, and drinking more, in order to relieve stress from a bad day. At the same time, the more one drinks, the more stress can accrue from increasingly poor decision-making. It can be a vicious cycle that gets harder to break the more the brain’s circuitry changes. But what about the long-term effects of stress and alcohol?
Scientists have successfully reconstructed videos purely from the brain activity of mice, showing what the mice were seeing, in a new study led by UCL researchers.
Dr. Nicolas Rouleau is a neuroscientist, bioengineer, and Assistant Professor of Health Sciences at Wilfrid Laurier University. He wrote the award-winning essay, ‘An Immortal Stream of Consciousness: The scientific evidence for the survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death,’ in which he argues that the transmissive theory of consciousness may actually be more consistent with emerging scientific insights than the dominant assumption that the brain generates consciousness.
In this conversation with Hans Busstra, Rouleau shares the main arguments from his essay, which touch upon his collaboration with Dr. Michael Persinger, the inventor of the ‘God Helmet,’ and his work with Michael Levin on ‘mind blindness’—the idea that science may be searching for mind in too restricted a place by focusing almost exclusively on neurons.
More information on Dr. Nic Rouleau:
https://www.wlu.ca/academics/facultie… website: https://www.rouleaulab.com/ Further reading and scientific references discussed in this video: Rouleau’s BICS Essay: ‘An Immortal Stream of Consciousness: The scientific evidence for the survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death.’ https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/inde… Rouleau, N., Levin, M., et al. (2025) (Preprint; forthcoming in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society). Brains and Where Else? Mapping Theories of Consciousness to Unconventional Embodiments. https://tinyurl.com/439rrn8z Rouleau, N., & Levin, M. (2023). The Multiple Realizability of Sentience in Living Systems and Beyond. eNeuro, 10(11). https://tinyurl.com/2s4bdtmm Rouleau, N. & Cimino, N. (2022). A Transmissive Theory of Brain Function: Implications for Health, Disease, and Consciousness. NeuroSci, 3. https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4087/3/3/32 McCraty, R., et al. (2018). Long-term study of heart rate variability responses to changes in the solar and geomagnetic environment. https://tinyurl.com/254x3b9t Rouleau, N., & Persinger, M. A. (2016). Differential responsiveness of the right parahippocampal region to electrical stimulation in fixed human brains: Implications for historical surgical stimulation studies. Epilepsy & Behavior, 60181–186. https://tinyurl.com/uc5jbr Rajaram, M., & Mitra, S. (1981). Correlation between convulsive seizure and geomagnetic activity. Neuroscience Letters, 24, 187–191. https://tinyurl.com/3snrs4cs Chapters 0:00 Introduction 4:00 What Nic Rouleau would say to William James about his theory of transmissive consciousness 7:14 What do we know empirically about how electromagnetic fields influence our brains? 10:27 How scientifically rigorous are the empirical data on the influence of the Earth’s magnetic field on brains? 11:35 On Nic’s mentor, Dr. Michael Persinger, the inventor of the God Helmet 14:42 Research on post-mortem brain tissue 18:09 What mental states are influenced by magnetic fields? 18:58 Electromagnetic effects in dead vs. living brains 19:45 On Michael Levin and the paradigm shift due to bioelectricity 21:24 Influencing the thoughts of deceased people 25:33 Are biological forms stored in the Earth’s magnetic field? 30:21 Shielding brains from electromagnetic fields 33:12 Mind blindness: we only see 1% of the minds out there 38:55 What is the best way out of mind blindness? 41:06 Plant-based computation 42:00 The Self-Organizing Units Lab (SOUL) and what Nic is working on 43:23 Minds in a Petri dish 46:13 What counts as embodiment? 48:44 Phenomenal consciousness on different levels 53:06 What theories of consciousness can get us out of the behaviorist trap? 57:25 Nic’s award-winning essay on consciousness beyond death 1:00:55 Intermediary states of consciousness, the Bardo Thodol 1:04:46 Consciousness when the radio, the brain, is completely broken 1:06:35 Why exactly is electromagnetism a better explanation of consciousness beyond death than NDEs or OBEs? 1:11:58 How does the God Helmet work? 1:17:31 Which electromagnetic fields influence our consciousness and which ones don’t? 1:23:59 Can all of consciousness be stored in the Earth’s magnetic field? 1:27:08 Children with past-life memories: could electromagnetism play a role there? 1:29:51 How do quantum theories of consciousness relate to the work of Nic? 1:33:42 Do our brains connect electromagnetically with each other? 1:35:28 Nic on the hard problem of consciousness 1:38:00 Aren’t you just a materialist 2.0? 1:40:25 On the meaning of Nic’s work Copyright © 2026 Essentia Foundation. All rights on interview content reserved.
Personal website: https://www.rouleaulab.com/
Further reading and scientific references discussed in this video:
Rouleau’s BICS Essay: ‘An Immortal Stream of Consciousness: The scientific evidence for the survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death.’ https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/inde…
Rouleau, N., Levin, M., et al. (2025) (Preprint; forthcoming in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society). Brains and Where Else? Mapping Theories of Consciousness to Unconventional Embodiments. https://tinyurl.com/439rrn8z.
Cerebral blood flow is essential for normal brain function and often perturbed in neurological disease. If one shines a source of coherent light on perfused tissue, the detected speckles, or “grains” of light fluctuate, or “dance,” at a rate proportional to blood flow in the volume sampled by the light. In brain tissue, this concept can be harnessed to measure the cerebral blood flow index (CBFi).
However, to date, implementations of this principle for noninvasive adult human brain monitoring—collectively known as diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS)—have achieved limited brain sensitivity. This is because the brain is 1–2 centimeters deep beneath the scalp and skull, meaning that the light must sample the superficial tissue before reaching the brain.
While the collection points can be moved further from the source to address this issue by improving sampling of the brain, this strategy requires many photon-counting channels to detect highly attenuated light far from the source. DCS becomes prohibitively expensive as the number of channels increases.