Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland)
November 20, 2024
Sarfaraz K Niazi
8 citations
The placebo effect can produce genuine physiological and neurological changes even when no active treatment is given, driven by the recipient's perceptions. Brain regions involved include the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, pontine nucleus, and cerebellum. Understanding these mechanisms sheds light on how psychedelics, SSRIs, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and deep brain stimulation modulate neurotransmitters. This knowledge may aid in developing new therapies and challenges the validity of randomized controlled trials as currently valued by regulatory agencies. Additionally, exploring how placebo effects incorporate social, political, and religious beliefs could help reduce global conflicts.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2026
Sarfaraz K Niazi
Empathy can be modulated through pharmacological, neurostimulation, and behavioral approaches, but effects are generally small to moderate and often temporary. Intranasal oxytocin shows modest, context-dependent effects (d = 0.24), while MDMA-assisted therapy yields larger benefits (d ≈ 0.91) in trauma-focused therapy but faces regulatory hurdles. Neurostimulation techniques like transcranial magnetic stimulation (d ≈ 0.18-0.20) offer causal insights but limited lasting behavioral change. Behavioral interventions, especially mindfulness-based programs longer than 24 hours (d = 0.37), show the greatest potential for scalability and sustainability. Empathy remains a promising but clinically constrained therapeutic target, requiring larger trials and standardized outcome measures.
Frontiers in artificial intelligence
January 1, 2025
Sarfaraz K Niazi
A new evaluation framework, the Machine Perturbational Complexity & Agency Battery (mPCAB), shifts AI assessment from task performance to the cognitive processes underlying human-like understanding. It applies neurophysiological methods originally used to assess consciousness, incorporating perturbational complexity, global workspace assessment, norm internalization, and agency to compare digital, neuromorphic, and biological substrates. The framework addresses gaps in long-term reasoning, norm internalization under distribution shifts, and transformational creativity involving meta-cognitive rule modification. By analyzing theories of consciousness and mapping human cognitive functions to computational counterparts, it provides design principles. Pilot studies show feasibility across substrates and comparable metrics, moving evaluation toward mechanism-based assessment for developing mind-like machines.