CA Students Examine the Psychology of the Self and the Neurobiology of Consciousness
She organized this new advanced biology course, Psychology of Self, around three central questions: What is the biological basis of selfhood? How do our brains perceive ourselves in the world? And what happens when our behavior conflicts with our sense of self? This last question particularly interests Kopelman, who also supports students in CA’s Academic Support Center as they strengthen executive functioning skills.
“My mission is to get kids to be independent learners,” she says. “I want to put them into situations where they have to figure out how they learn and communicate their understanding.”
Students took part in discussions, hands-on activities, and experiments. They analyzed brain studies and gave presentations. Each week, one student would prepare a slideshow on a scientific article about the brain and a topic such as personality, perception, brain injury, coma, or sleep.
Kopelman enjoyed seeing the way her students responded to each other’s presentations. “I’m so impressed with the beautiful, thoughtful questions that they asked each other, the grace they’ve given each other, and how deeply they listened,” she says.
She wanted to ground the course in philosophical frameworks of self-perception, but she acknowledged this would be a learning experience for her as well. After a coincidental meeting, she invited Ollie Longo ’21, who earned his bachelor’s in philosophy from Wesleyan University in 2025, to join her in her classroom. Drawing on his experience tutoring, he came on several days to guide discussions with students, exploring and contrasting the mind-body dualism of René Descartes, the skeptical empiricism of David Hume, and the concept of stream of consciousness coined by William James.
Longo says the students’ engagement impressed him: “All of the things they were interrogating were really central ideas. Exploring complicated issues can be disorienting, frankly, but I think that disorientation is one of the values of philosophy.” He credits his CA education, particularly his English classes, with cultivating his interdisciplinary intellectual interests and says he’s interested in teaching, “potentially at the high school level, where I was most influenced.”
The class included a neuroanatomy practical exam—dissecting a sheep’s brain. Longo returned afterward to talk with students about animal ethics and the moral worth humans assign other animals based on our perceptions of degrees of sentience.
Seeing the structures of the brain during this dissection made a big impression on Luke Schumacher ’26, who plans on a premed track in college and says this course made him consider majoring in psychology. The final project for the class was a self-directed research paper. Luke chose to study how antihistamines and decongestants can alter consciousness. First-generation antihistamines, such as Benadryl, he explains, cross the blood-brain barrier and can produce sedative effects and, in some cases, hallucinations.
The topics other students chose for their final projects varied widely. Zuri Gonzalez ’26 researched how the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder can interrupt self-awareness. She wanted to know: Are you still conscious if you’re experiencing a symptom of PTSD? She was initially interested in a study that showed playing puzzle games can prevent the development of PTSD, and she broadened her lens as she learned about the condition’s many manifestations in mood changes, flashbacks, and emotional repression, eventually focusing on studies of women who had experienced repeated childhood abuse and dissociative symptoms. She learned that patients benefit most from individually tailored treatment modalities. “Even if two people go through the same thing, the way they respond is going to be different,” she says.
She enjoyed the interweaving of philosophy and experimentation in the course. “It was so fun and free,” she says. “I liked that I could have my own ideas and that the topics were so broad, I could find my own way of exploring consciousness.”
For her final paper, Emilia Deng ’27 compared human consciousness with artificial intelligence, animal consciousness, and plant consciousness. She was struck by studies demonstrating that plants learn, changing their behaviour in response to repeated experience. “I think that part of what makes us such a great species is our ability to have empathy,” she says, “but when we don’t extend that empathy outside of our own species, it gets really difficult to ascertain where the line is between right and wrong.”
For a presentation, she researched predictive processing and the predictive global neuronal workspace theory. “Every time you encounter something, your brain is firing the neurons that fired when you had a similar experience,” she explains. “Learning about the way my brain is functioning in every moment has led me to see that everything is literally physically interconnected.”
She also researched the therapeutic uses of AI, which she personally avoids as detrimental to her learning. She learned about a specific AI application that showed some benefit for patients with schizophrenia through generating images of internal demons patients design as avatars, to externalize what they are seeing and hearing. “I still think it is harmful when you place AI in the role of a human, for example, the therapist,” Emilia says.
She remains skeptical about the technology’s effects on human consciousness more broadly. “The language we use for AI is so much more blunt than what we would use with humans, and that kind of change in language can carry over to human-to-human interactions,” she says.
Emilia says this course made her more aware of how she engages with others. “I’ve been more intentional with the way I treat language and my interactions, understanding that we can’t ever know everything that’s happening, just use what we can intentionally and take in the world around us in a more empathetic way.”
For Celeste Bogan ’27, the combination of science and philosophy in the course helped her feel OK with not knowing while considering a range of theories. She appreciated how receptive Kopelman was when she chose an out-of-the-ordinary topic for her final paper: accounts from scientific journals of young children reporting memories of past lives. Celeste was struck by the sheer number of cases from different cultures around the world, their similarities, and how many involved verifiable evidence. “I felt like I was going to get some funny looks,” she says, “and the fact that Kim just reviewed the foundational science and gave me this leeway to get hypothetical and still be taken seriously—that was so big.”
Celeste also presented on quantum consciousness research. To understand it, she had to give herself a crash course in quantum mechanics, a fundamental principle of which is superposition, or the concept that at a subatomic scale, quantum particles exist in multiple states of potential at once, but at the moment of observation settle into one reality.
“New research is coming out that the collapse of multiple realities into one may be what causes consciousness,” she says. “It requires a different mindset than the materialistic worldview the scientific community relies on now, but through a quantum lens, consciousness comes before the physical world, exists outside of our brains and bodies, which brings me full circle to my past life memories research. The implications are mindboggling.”
Celeste says the course has fundamentally shifted her understanding of consciousness, and that the most rewarding part has been simply the encouragement to pursue her own questions. “I’ve learned a lot about myself and my worldview, my thoughts, emotions, and experiences,” she says, “and that’s very special to get in a class.”
