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Neuroscience has made progress in deciphering how our brains think and perceive our surroundings, but a central feature of cognition is still deeply mysterious: namely, that many of our perceptions and thoughts are accompanied by the subjective experience of having them. Consciousness, the name we give to that experience, can’t yet be explained — but science is at least beginning to understand it. In this episode, the consciousness researcher Anil Seth and host Steven Strogatz discuss why our perceptions can be described as a “controlled hallucination,” how consciousness played into the internet sensation known as “the dress,” and how people at home can help researchers catalog the full range of ways that we experience the world.
Steven Strogatz (00:03): I’m Steve Strogatz, and this is The Joy of Why, a podcast from Quanta Magazine that takes you into some of the biggest unanswered questions in math and science today. In this episode, we’re going to be discussing the mystery of consciousness. The mystery being that when your brain cells fire in certain patterns, it actually feels like something. It might feel like jealousy or a toothache, or the memory of your mother’s face, or the scent of her favorite perfume. But other patterns of brain activity don’t really feel like anything at all. Right now, for instance, I’m probably forming some memories somewhere deep in my brain. But the process of that memory formation is imperceptible to me. I can’t feel it. It doesn’t give rise to any sort of internal subjective experience at all. In other words, I’m not conscious of it.
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Peter Greenwood for Quanta Magazine
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