THE SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

April 25-30, 2016 - Tucson, ARIZONA   

Loews Ventana Canyon Resort

 

PLENARY

 

TUESDAY

April 26, 2016

2:00 pm to 4:10 pm   

PL 1 -Five Roads to Consciousness

Anil K. Seth

University of Sussex, Brighton

Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience

Co-Director, Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science


School of Engineering and Informatics
University of Sussex UK

 

Anil Seth is a neuroscientist who conducts multidisciplinary research on the biological basis of conscious experience. His work draws together brain science, psychology, philosophy, computer science and AI, physics and mathematics, and psychiatry and neurology, in a unique attempt to unravel the complex brain networks underlying consciousness – and what happens when they go wrong.  He is also leading research into statistical analysis of causal interaction in neurophysiological and neuroimaging data.  Anil is strongly committed to public involvement in science and gives regular open lectures on consciousness and other topics. 

 

Anil is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and Founding Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. He is Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal Neuroscience of Consciousness (Oxford University Press) and was Conference Chair of the 16th Meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC16, 2012). He has published more than 100 academic papers in a variety of fields, and he holds degrees in Natural Sciences (MA, Cambridge, 1994), Knowledge-Based Systems (M.Sc., Sussex, 1996) and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (D.Phil., Sussex, 2000). He was also a Postdoctoral and then Associate Fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, where we worked with Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman (2001-2006). Anil is Editor and Co-Author of 30 Second Brain (Ivy Press, 2014), was Consultant for Eye Benders (Ivy Press, 2013; winner of the Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize 2014) and Brain Twister (Ivy Press, 2015). He contributes regularly to many media including the New Scientist, The Guardian, and the BBC - for which he was recently profiled (May 2015) on the flagship science biography series The Life Scientific.

Key recent papers

 

  • Seth, A.K., Barrett, A.B., and Barnett, L.C. (2015). Granger causality analysis in neuroscience and neuroimaging. Journal of Neuroscience 35(8):3293-3297
  • Seth, A.K. (2015). The cybernetic Bayesian brain: from interoceptive inference to sensorimotor contingencies. In Open MIND, eds. T. Metzinger & J. Windt. Frankfurt a.M., GER: MIND group
  • Seth, A.K. (2014). A predictive processing theory of sensorimotor contingencies: Explaining the puzzle of perceptual presence and its absence in synaesthesia. Cognitive Neuroscience (target article) 5(2):97-118
  • Seth, A.K. (2013).  Interoceptive inference, emotion, and the embodied self.  Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17(11):656-663
  • Seth, A.K., Barrett, A.B., and Barnett, L.C. (2011). Causal density and integrated information as measures of conscious level. Phil. Trans R. Soc A. 368:3748-3676