{"id":229043,"date":"2026-01-14T21:04:04","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T03:04:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/this-new-tool-could-tell-us-how-consciousness-works"},"modified":"2026-01-14T21:04:04","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T03:04:04","slug":"this-new-tool-could-tell-us-how-consciousness-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/this-new-tool-could-tell-us-how-consciousness-works","title":{"rendered":"This new tool could tell us how consciousness works"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/this-new-tool-could-tell-us-how-consciousness-works2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The technology has entered use in recent years, but it isn\u2019t yet fully integrated into research. Now, two MIT researchers are planning experiments with it, and have published a new paper they term a \u201croadmap\u201d for using the tool to study consciousness.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTranscranial focused ultrasound will let you stimulate different parts of the brain in healthy subjects, in ways you just couldn\u2019t before,\u201d says <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ll.mit.edu\/biographies\/daniel-freeman\" target=\"_blank\">Daniel Freeman<\/a>, an MIT researcher and co-author of a new paper on the subject. \u201cThis is a tool that\u2019s not just useful for medicine or even basic science, but could also help address the hard problem of consciousness. It can probe where in the brain are the neural circuits that generate a sense of pain, a sense of vision, or even something as complex as human thought.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Transcranial focused ultrasound is noninvasive and reaches deeper into the brain, with greater resolution, than other forms of brain stimulation, such as transcranial magnetic or electrical stimulation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The technology has entered use in recent years, but it isn\u2019t yet fully integrated into research. Now, two MIT researchers are planning experiments with it, and have published a new paper they term a \u201croadmap\u201d for using the tool to study consciousness. \u201cTranscranial focused ultrasound will let you stimulate different parts of the brain in [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229043\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}