Canada
In Canada, prasterone is a Controlled Drug listed under Section 23 of Schedule IV of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act and as such is available by prescription only. United Kingdom
Prasterone is listed as an anabolic steroid and is thus a class C controlled drug. United States
Prasterone is legal to sell in the United States as a dietary supplement. It is currently grandfathered in as an "Old Dietary Ingredient" being on sale prior to 1994. Prasterone is specifically exempted from the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 1990 and 2004. Sports and athletics
Prasterone is banned from use in athletic competition. It is a prohibited substance under the World Anti-Doping Code of the World Anti-Doping Agency, which manages drug testing for Olympics and other sports. Yulia Efimova, who holds the world record pace for both the 50-meter and 200-meter breaststroke, and won the bronze medal in the 200-meter breaststroke in the 2012 London Olympic Games, tested positive for prasterone in an out-of-competition doping test. Rashard Lewis, then with the Orlando Magic, tested positive for prasterone and was suspended 10 games before the start of the 2009–10 season. In 2016 MMA fighter Fabio Maldonado revealed he was taking prasterone during his time with the UFC. In January 2011, NBA player O. J. Mayo was given a 10-game suspension after testing positive for prasterone. Mayo termed his use of prasterone as "an honest mistake," saying the prasterone was in an over-the-counter supplement and that he was unaware the supplement was banned by the NBA.
In the attention schema theory, the value of explaining the feature of awareness and attributing it to a person is to gain a useful predictive model of that persons attentional processing. Attention is a style of information processing in which a brain focuses its resources on a limited set of interrelated signals. Awareness, in this theory, is a useful, simplified schema that represents attentional states. To be aware of X is explained by constructing a model of ones attentional focus on X. In 2013, the perturbational complexity index (PCI) was proposed, a measure of the algorithmic complexity of the electrophysiological response of the cortex to transcranial magnetic stimulation. This measure was shown to be higher in individuals that are awake, in REM sleep or in a locked-in state than in those who are in deep sleep or in a vegetative state, making it potentially useful as a quantitative assessment of consciousness states. In 2017, work by David Rudrauf and colleagues, including Karl Friston, applied the active inference paradigm to consciousness, a model of how sensory data is integrated with priors in a process of projective transformation. The authors argue that, while their model identifies a key relationship between computation and phenomenology, it does not completely solve the hard problem of consciousness or completely close the explanatory gap.Assuming that not only humans but even some non-mammalian species are conscious, a number of evolutionary approaches to the problem of neural correlates of consciousness open up.