Is AI conscious? I have no idea. But I'm excited to spend a week talking about problems in consciousness, disorders of consciousness, dreaming, delirium, perception that may actually be experimentally tractable 😅 Apply now - space is limited! Links below

Maybe we need a little psilocybin to make the placebo work

Applications are open! We have an *incredible* lineup of speakers at the 2027 GRC/GRS on Consciousness, Anesthesia and Evolutionary Biology - January 17-22, 2027 SoCal. Keynotes by Christof Koch, @doristsao (GRC) and @mattlark (GRS). see link below for the prelim program -

..in which ibogaine is the ancient cure for being the Incredible Hulk, ft Kim Cattrall (1979)...

along the way, we saw some incredible things - including 3 cases of remission of PTSD / acute stress disorder associated with dreams. The idea that we could turn a traumatic surgical encounter into a transformative life event is amazing to me- stay tuned pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3595… pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3847…

The protocol is straightforward and evidence based - verbal priming, EEG guidance, wake up on propofol, undisturbed emergence, and immediate interview. Undisturbed in an OR is... not easy. Not a coincidence that step pushes success from 69% --> 93%.

Why would we do this? For one, we were able to add a positive experience to an otherwise stressful surgical encounter. Many patients described the sleep quality in glowing terms -

Out of ~500 patients, zero *awareness* of the operating room environment - this is disconnected consciousness. Maybe it's just our incredible bedside manner, but these experiences were overwhelmingly positive and often intense. Incredible effort by @drpuppychow @PilleriinSikka and our OR team. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4163…

Anesthesia is just like dreamless sleep, right? RIGHT? Cover story @_Anesthesiology - we developed an operating room protocol to promote dreaming during emergence from anesthesia... under the best conditions we found that **93%** of patients had experiences

oh I am - if the anesthesia emergence experience *on its own* checks many of the same boxes as ~20mg psilocybin, this experiment doesn't rly test whether experience matters. The nuance is, anesthesia dream experience are hard to recall (sometimes not), unknown if psilo + anes is similar. MEQ30 for anesth dreaming vs JHU's study on various doses of psilo