Consciousness

Short, surprising cards on consciousness. Each one is labelled Established, Debated or Speculative, so you always know how solid the evidence is.

• The US Army once wrote a report on leaving your body.

  Established. In 1983, Army intelligence officer Lt. Col. Wayne McDonnell assessed the Gateway Process, a meditation method taught at the Monroe…

• For over 20 years, the US government paid people to spy with their minds.

  Established. From the early 1970s to 1995, US agencies funded research into "remote viewing": describing a distant place using only the mind. By the end…

• Long-time meditators produce brainwaves most people rarely reach.

  Established. In 2004, neuroscientists in Wisconsin measured Tibetan Buddhist practitioners with tens of thousands of hours of meditation. During…

• A placebo can work even when you know it is a placebo.

  Established. In a 2010 Harvard study, people with irritable bowel syndrome were openly given sugar pills, clearly labelled as such. They still reported…

• Can awareness continue after the heart stops?

  Debated. The AWARE study followed more than 2,000 cardiac arrests in hospitals across the UK, US and Austria. One patient accurately described…

• Do moments of mass emotion ripple through random numbers?

  Speculative. Since 1998, the Global Consciousness Project has run random number generators around the world. It asks whether big shared moments, like…

• Nobody can explain why you experience anything at all.

  Debated. Science can map which brain areas light up when you see red. What it cannot yet explain is why there is an inner feeling of red at all. In…

• Scientists have talked to people while they were dreaming.

  Established. In a lucid dream, you know you are dreaming. In the late 1970s, researchers showed lucid dreamers could signal from inside a dream using…

• Cutting the brain in half can create two minds that disagree.

  Established. To treat severe epilepsy, some patients had the bridge between their brain's halves cut. Roger Sperry's experiments, which won a Nobel…

• In a 2006 study, most volunteers ranked a single session among their life's most meaningful moments.

  Established. Researchers at Johns Hopkins gave psilocybin, the compound in 'magic mushrooms', to healthy volunteers under careful supervision. Most…

• Can one person send an image to another's mind?

  Debated. In ganzfeld experiments, a 'receiver' relaxes with halved ping-pong balls over their eyes and white noise in their ears. A 'sender' in…

• A psychiatrist spent 40 years studying children who described past lives.

  Speculative. Dr Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia collected around 2,500 cases of young children who spoke of memories from another life. In…

• Your heart has its own little brain.

  Established. The heart contains a network of tens of thousands of neurons, sometimes called the 'little brain in the heart'. It helps control heart…

• Doctors switch off consciousness every day, without fully knowing how.

  Established. General anaesthesia has been used since the 1840s and is very safe. Yet scientists still do not fully understand how it turns off…