Designed to help people with self-condemnation struggles in Trinidad and Tobago, the REACH self-forgiveness intervention is being examined as a tool to alleviate emotional distress, improve mental health and reduce addictive and suicidal behaviors.

By examining the phenomenon of blindsight, new research aims to discover cell types and brain areas specifically required for the conscious component of vision but expendable for the unconscious component. If successful, these discoveries will help researchers identify what kinds of brain cells might be uniquely necessary for consciousness.

One view of consciousness is that it is simply a subjective observation of brain processes. A competing view is that consciousness plays a crucial role in agency and free will. A new study from a team led by Uri Maoz at Chapman University has the potential to provide new information around this topic, fostering constructive discussion around the debate among competing theories of consciousness.

A new project will study rodents using recently introduced high-density electrodes that, for the first time, allow scientists to record the activity of thousands of different brain cells, including in brain areas that have rarely, if ever, been studied in consciousness research. With these tools, researchers will be able to address some long-standing questions in consciousness research, such as whether our capacity to be conscious depends on one part of the cerebral cortex more than another and if so, why.

While many theories of consciousness disagree about the specifics, they all agree that some types of neural activity reflect unconscious processing, while other types result in conscious experience. This project will feature experiments focused on visual perception that aim to measure the neural dynamics underlying the transition from unconscious to conscious processing known as “bifurcation”.