![]() He received a Masters of Science in Knowledge-Based Systems at the University of Sussex in 1996 and said academia provided the resources and professors to help him explore different avenues of addressing consciousness and how it determines what we perceive, from psychology to brain imaging data. Seth continued to study the brain after university. “I think that gave me the motivation to think I want to know more.” “I said, ‘something is missing here’,” Seth told me. In Consciousness Explained, cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett described consciousness as a cluster of brain activity, rather than a centralized entity. In The Emperor’s New Mind, Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist, posited that some parts of the human mind would never be replicated by a machine. At Cambridge University, he started to absorb books on the topic while studying natural sciences. Seth, who grew up in Oxfordshire, England, became fascinated by consciousness around the age of 19 through the lens of math and physics. “We don’t just passively perceive the world, we actively generate it,” he said in a 2017 Ted Talk. Which is why he says our conscious reality is so similar to hallucination-the only difference is that we collectively agree on these particular hallucinations and deem them reality. For example, we might see an object through the visual cortex, but what helps us identify said object is the past compendium of information we have accumulated until that point. The brain combines sensory signals, processes it in the context of what it knows from the past, and guesses what is happening in real time. The way Seth explains it, our perceptions are a combination of electrical impulses and prediction. Seth and his team are applying a range of methods and tools-from computational science and virtual reality to brain imaging-to identify the mechanisms that compose consciousness. The Sackler Centre is home base for Seth’s world of neuroscience, but also philosophers, physicists, computational scientists, and artists-creating a multidisciplinary tableau through which to look at questions about the mind and brain. “Time, vision, hearing…we want to explain that.” “Most ambitiously, we want a unified theory of perception,” Seth said about the goal of the lab. (For example, there is something like the way it is to be a mouse, but not a coffee mug.) And he wants to understand how this shapes how we experience the world. Anil Seth, a neuroscientist and director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex, researches the biological basis of the otherwise ethereal topic of consciousness, which he defines as the state when there is “something it is like to be” an organism.
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