The question of how consciousness happens is probably one of the biggest mysteries that still remain in science and in philosophy.

About Anil Seth
"I'm a professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex.
My research is into the brain basis of consciousness, the nature of perception, and what it means to be a self."

One of the biggest mysteries

The question of how consciousness happens is probably one of the biggest mysteries that still remain in science and in philosophy. Consciousness is, on the one hand, the most familiar phenomenon – we all know what it is to be a conscious person. But exactly how conscious experiences depend on the physical material processes in our brains and in our bodies is, for many people, still a complete mystery.

Key Points

• How conscious experiences depend on the physical material processes in our brains and in our bodies is still a mystery.
• Studying the difference between wakefulness and consciousness, and trying to understand if there’s any residual consciousness in the vegetative state, is one of the more important applications in medicine today.
• Neuroscientists try to build explanatory bridges between what happens in the brain, in the body, and what happens in our conscious experience. We try to look for for what have been called neural correlates of consciousness
• According to the global workspace theory, we become conscious of some sensory information when that sensory information activates a broad network of brain regions in the frontal and the so-called parietal regions of the brain.
• The mechanisms that underlie the conscious experience appear to be widely shared in the animal kingdom. There may be a lot of creatures out there who lack the cognitive flexibility that we humans have, but have the capacity to experience suffering.