{"id":230833,"date":"2026-02-07T22:02:26","date_gmt":"2026-02-08T04:02:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/mits-new-brain-tool-could-finally-explain-consciousness"},"modified":"2026-02-07T22:02:26","modified_gmt":"2026-02-08T04:02:26","slug":"mits-new-brain-tool-could-finally-explain-consciousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/mits-new-brain-tool-could-finally-explain-consciousness","title":{"rendered":"MIT\u2019s new brain tool could finally explain consciousness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/mits-new-brain-tool-could-finally-explain-consciousness.webp\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Although the technology has been around for several years, it has not yet become a standard tool in neuroscience research. Now, two researchers at MIT are preparing new experiments using the technique and have published a paper that serves as a detailed guide, or \u201croadmap,\u201d for applying it to the study of 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 Daniel Freeman, an MIT researcher and co-author of the paper. \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>Unlike other brain stimulation methods, transcranial focused ultrasound does not require surgery. It can reach deeper areas of the brain with greater precision than techniques such as transcranial magnetic or electrical stimulation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Although the technology has been around for several years, it has not yet become a standard tool in neuroscience research. Now, two researchers at MIT are preparing new experiments using the technique and have published a paper that serves as a detailed guide, or \u201croadmap,\u201d for applying it to the study of consciousness. \u201cTranscranial focused [\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-230833","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\/230833","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=230833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230833\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}