4.8 • 985 Ratings
🗓️ 29 September 2023
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
It's pretty obvious to each of us that we are conscious, as we go about our days and feel the experience of just ‘being ourselves'. But how do we know that someone else is conscious?
It’s something we lose during dreamless sleep, under anaesthesia or in a coma. But what exactly is consciousness? On the one hand, it’s pretty obvious - it’s what we all feel as we go about our daily lives. It's the experience of 'being you'. On the other hand, it gets pretty tricky when we try to pin down the science of it all. How do we know that someone (or something) else is conscious?
CrowdScience listener Sylvester was wondering about this and he got in touch with a few questions on the subject. What is the relationship between our consciousness and reality? Is it all just a hallucination? When does it start and stop? Does consciousness reside in a particular part of the brain?
Host Marnie Chesterton sets out to tackle this elusive but utterly fundamental quality of life and sees how researchers are attempting to conceptualise and study it.
In the relatively young field of consciousness multiple theories have emerged. A new way of testing them - an adversarial collaboration - is offering a novel approach to not just consciousness research but science more broadly. We visit one lab in Frankfurt that's running experiments for the most recent adversarial collaboration and trying to test two theories of consciousness – Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNW) and Integrated Information Theory (IIT) – against each other.
Looking at these and other concepts of consciousness like Qualia, Marnie tries to understand this central tenet of our human experience that, in many ways, remains one of the great mysteries of science.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Sam Baker Editor: Richard Collings Production Coordinator: Jonathan Harris Studio Manager: Sarah Hockley Featuring:
Anil Seth, Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex in Brighton, England Lucia Melloni, Max Planck for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, New York University & Project Lead for COGITATE Nao Tsuchiya, Monash Data Futures Institute, Turner Institute for Brain & Mental Health, Monash University
(Image: Active Human Brain. Credit: PM Images / Getty Images)
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0:00.0 | Take some time for yourself with soothing classical music from the mindful mix, the Science of |
0:07.0 | Happiness Podcast. |
0:08.0 | For the last 20 years I've dedicated my career to exploring the science of living a happier more meaningful life and I want |
0:14.4 | to share that science with you. |
0:16.1 | And just one thing, deep calm with Michael Mosley. |
0:19.4 | I want to help you tap in to your hidden relaxation response system and open the door to that |
0:25.4 | calmer place within. Listen on BBC Sounds. |
0:30.3 | Take a moment to examine your surroundings right now. |
0:37.0 | What can you see in front of you? |
0:39.0 | What sounds, apart from this episode of crowd science, can you hear? |
0:44.0 | For me, I'm looking at my hands and a microphone. |
0:48.0 | There's the smell of my lunch coming from my bag. |
0:51.0 | I can hear the hum of computers, and through the window, to one side, I can see the clouds |
0:56.6 | scud across the sky. |
0:58.7 | I think about whether that means there'll be rain today. All of these sensory inputs and opinions come together to build a picture of my present reality. |
1:09.8 | But it feels like there's something that's greater than the sum of those parts, a sense of me being |
1:15.5 | here, experiencing all of this and thinking about it. |
1:20.2 | It's a hard concept to grasp, but this is crowd science from the BBC World Service. |
1:25.1 | I'm Marnie Chesterton and this show runs with open arms towards tricky topics. |
1:30.5 | In a very recent episode, we dealt with growing brains in the lab, but there was one aspect |
1:36.8 | we didn't fully explain. Consciousness. Well, we're back for another go because Listner Sylvester from New Orleans got in touch |
1:46.1 | with a lot of questions about consciousness, starting with... |
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