January 2026
The publication is seriously covering consciousness research, a sign of the intense interest among scientists and the public. A recent article highlights the search for signs of primordial consciousness in the universe.
GRAPHIC Compilation of screen shots from popularmechanics.com
Popular Mechanics has run 10 stories within the past two months on the science of consciousness. It is a major commitment to giving credence to the body of evidence suggesting the brain is more than a machine.
The nature of its recent stories on consciousness shows how expert thinking on the subject is moving beyond a strict materialist paradigm. Those pieces investigated whether consciousness existed before life, if it came from a higher dimension, and whether Carl Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious might actually be real, among other inquiries.
Perhaps the most eminent researchers featured were those highlighted in a January 16 article: “Consciousness Formed Before Life Itself, Scientists Say—and the Evidence Could Be in This Asteroid Sample.”
Dr. Stuart Hameroff, whom the magazine identifies as “one of the world’s leading experts on consciousness,” is collaborating with Dante Lauretta, founding director of the Arizona Astrobiology Center, and other scientists, to investigate whether the Bennu asteroid provides evidence of a “proto-consciousness”.
Hameroff and Nobel Laureate physicist Sir Roger Penrose in the 1990s developed the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR) theory that consciousness is associated with quantum computations in microtubules within neurons. Per the hypothesis, consciousness is not an emergent property of a developing brain, which is the conventional physicalist view. Proto-consciousness is “fundamental to the universe,” according to Penrose.
Now, Hameroff, Lauretta, and materials scientist Anirban Bandyopadhyay are investigating whether a form of consciousness existed before biological life.
They theorize that “quantum oscillations” similar to that in human brain cells might have occurred within crystalline formations discovered among organic compounds in the Bennu samples. Bandyopadhyay, whose research has found evidence of such oscillations in microtubules, says consciousness is more like a vast orchestra than a computer. That music may already have been playing in the early stages of our solar system.
The material in the Bennu asteroid is over four billion years old. Samples of that material were recovered through a NASA mission headed by Lauretta. The samples continue to reveal fascinating clues to the origins of life, as detailed in several recent prominent studies. But to find any evidence that consciousness may have preceded life would be the most dramatic finding.
The research team has yet to publish any results from its speculative investigation, but the three men are scheduled to present at the 32nd annual The Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson, Arizona, April 6-11.
Popular Mechanics, while criticized by some for departing from its original fix-it-yourself articles, is following scientific evidence into the workings of reality, in spite of controversy or skepticism.
Written by Tom Zolper
Edited by Anders Bolling & Liza Horan
