Building a Science of Consciousness

In this episode, QRI's research director, Andres Gomez Emilsson, describes his experience with a 2-week Jhanas meditation retreat. He talks about what it means to experience higher dimensions, his personal background with meditation, the retreat protocol, and commentary on the lectures given by Rob Burbea. He also shares how QRI's paradigms are relevant in this context, new insights, and additional realizations. Lastly, he discusses the effect of various scents/perfumes and mild psychoactives on Jhanas meditation.

In this episode, we explore the similarities between the brain and a musical instrument. We illustrate how the brain tissue is represented by metal and how brain activity can be mimicked by sound. We also demonstrate how substances such as psychedelics and dissociatives can be used to alter brain activity. This model is based on the fact that both sound and neuronal firing are examples of oscillatory activity which can have different frequency, amplitude, coherence, and damping.

In this episode, we explore the hard problem of consciousness. What is it, and why is it so hard to solve? We'll also discuss the work of the Qualia Research Institute, and what they're doing to try to quantify and map the qualia landscape. We discuss how consciousness is the only thing we can ever experience, yet it is mostly ignored by science. We also explore how the study of consciousness is still on the same primitive level as the sciences of astronomy and chemistry were hundreds of years ago.

Exploring emergent simplicity by adding 5-MeO-DMT to the brain, leading to a simpler state without selfhood or agency. Using examples like carbon dioxide on Earth to explain how complexity can shift to simplicity in systems.

In this episode, we discuss with the ontology of reality with Andrés Gómez Emilsson from the Qualia Research Institute, Daniel Ingram from the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium (EPRC), and Frank Yang (body-builder turned meditator). This conversation was very fruitful, given that Daniel and Frank are advanced and accomplished meditators with a vast experience base that informs their understanding of what is possible in the realm of consciousness. We explore various QRI paradigms and test their explanatory power and consistency with the first-person experience of Daniel and Frank.

Exploring haptic vibrations for enhancing psychedelic therapy, using Subpack device, creating foundational patterns for multisensory stimulation. Research on effects of various stimuli like tones, music, frequencies, and sounds on body parts, discussing noise colors, fractal audio, and therapeutic applications.

In this episode, Steven Lehar overviews the core insights of his life's work in perceptual research. He discusses the paradox of visual experience, amodal perception and perceptual reification, the ontology of visual experience, and gestalt theory. He also talks about the properties of harmonic resonance and how they can be used to understand and model perception.

Discussion on limitations of current research paradigms for studying exotic consciousness states, weird properties of experiences, challenging current understanding of consciousness, and proposing ideas for systematic study.

In this episode, we discuss the preliminary findings of our research into visual tracers on altered states of consciousness. We explain how we developed a fine-grained vocabulary and an interactive tool to allow users to replicate the effects in detail. We share our current understanding of the characteristics of tracers for each of the conditions we have datapoints for, and argue that they might have unexpected applications. Finally, we explain how to generalize this paradigm to other core psychedelic effects.

In this episode, we hear from Quintin Frerichs of the Qualia Research Institute about Neural Annealing - a theory for how the brain updates emotional beliefs. Frerichs discusses how this theory can help us to understand how the brain processes information, and how it can be applied to improve our understanding of mental illness and other neurological conditions.