The 3 big things in Spirit Tech this week:

Tech and venture dollars are flooding consciousness science: a rescue, or a capture of the field?

A recent Nature article describes a wave of corporate and venture money chasing "computational signatures" of consciousness in AI: Anthropic's contested, non-peer-reviewed claim of conscious-like processing in its model Claude, a $3 million Israeli grant, and venture-backed labs adapting human consciousness tests for machines. Others push back hard, with Sussex neuroscientist Anil Seth warning of a "capture of consciousness research by the AI sector" that sidelines how awareness works in living brains, while one ethicist notes AI firms have reasons to hype awareness (to sell companion chatbots) or downplay it (to dodge regulation). Cutting against that computational grain, Christof Koch, now a Meritorious Investigator at the Allen Institute, argued the same week that materialism has not cracked the hard problem, citing near-death experiences and terminal lucidity as hints that consciousness may be fundamental rather than made by the brain. For Spirit Tech, the intimate question of what makes an experience conscious is now being funded and framed by the companies with the most to gain from a particular answer, which is precisely where independent stewardship and research become critical.

A peer-reviewed study ties stronger religious faith to trusting outer cues over inner bodily signals, and holding a sense of control even when the two conflict.

Published in Neuroscience of Consciousness, the study ran 62 women through the Mirror Box Illusion, which pits what you see against what your body does, measuring felt ownership and agency alongside self-reported faith and interoception. The stronger a participant's faith, the more they felt in control of a hand even when its movements did not match their own (a reduced sensitivity to the mismatch), and the lower their interoceptive sensibility and attunement to internal bodily signals. The authors read this as a perceptual strategy that leans on external, visual cues over internal, motor ones; the study is correlational and behavioral rather than neural, so it maps a tendency, not the underlying mechanisms. For anyone building contemplative or biofeedback technology: the interoceptive attunement these tools train may pull against how strong faith organizes the self.

Vancouver startup Prana Labs is raising a $1.2M pre-seed for Vayu, its wrist-worn AI breathwork app, after a preprint reported a 28.6% median rise in users' heart-rate variability.

Vayu guides your breathing with haptic taps on the wrist and, reading your heart-rate variability live, speeds or eases the breathing pace to match how your body responds, closing the biofeedback loop that passive meditation apps (which guide but don't measure you) and trackers like Oura or WHOOP (which measure but don't intervene) each leave half-open. The adaptive method is patent-pending, and a medRxiv preprint (not yet peer-reviewed) of a four-to-six-week pilot with 199 users across Canada, the US, and India logged a 28.6% HRV gain by week four alongside a 7.4-beat drop in resting heart rate. Stickiness matters more than its 70,000 downloads: over the pilot, 71% of active users logged at least three sessions a week, and Prana Labs claims 30-day retention at more than 2x the category average, high for a field where most wellness apps are quietly abandoned. The bet worth watching, at least in biofeedback's corner of Spirit Tech, is the form factor: with no screen, no app, and no voice, Vayu can catch stress in real time and nudge you to breathe on the spot whether in a meeting or in bed, sparing both the willpower a manual practice takes and the phone a rival app makes you open, though for now this edge rests on one small pilot.

Top jobs

• Chief of Staff, GTM @ Slingshot AI: Build the enterprise go-to-market engine for Ash, the first AI designed for mental health, selling into payers, employers, and health systems. New York.
• Senior Staff Software Engineer @ YouVersion: Lead large-scale engineering for the worldwide Bible app. 8 other roles available across Marketing, Engineering, Support. Edmond, OK.
• Animator (Mid-Senior) @ Thatgamecompany: Hand-key character animation at the studio behind Sky and Journey, games built around wonder and connection. Remote (US) · $78k–$128k.
• Finance & Grants Integration Manager @ Fetzer Institute: Design the financial systems and grant workflows behind a foundation working to build "the spiritual foundation for a loving world." Full-time.

Browse the Spirit Tech jobs board for more roles, or to post one at your organization.