Consciousness podcasts

Neuroscientist George Paxinos speaks with Thanos Chatziandreou about brain mapping, consciousness and the questions that remain open in neuroscience. The Greek-language conversation also considers neurodegenerative disease, prevention, AI and the relationship between scientific knowledge, human behaviour and responsibility for the future.

Hosted by Θάνος Χατζηανδρέου

Paul Middlebrooks and Johannes Jaeger discuss agency in living systems, relevance realization, consciousness, energy efficiency and why biological organisms differ from artificial agents.

James Harrison presents his proposed account of hypnosis as mental foraging, relating changes in attention and internal state to memory and prediction. The conversation explores interoception, engagement with the external world and memory reconsolidation as possible ways to explain hypnotic experience.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Ehud Ahissar explains active perception through closed loops linking movement and sensation, drawing on work with rodent whiskers. He introduces perceptual dualism as a proposed distinction between communication within the brain and interactions with the world, and explores its implications for consciousness and neural dynamics.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Jaan Aru examines biological mechanisms that may matter for consciousness, including dendritic integration and interactions between cortex and thalamus. The discussion connects these mechanisms to cognition and prospects for artificial consciousness, then explores insight and creativity across ordinary problem-solving and altered experiences.

Michael Shadlen develops an account of how thoughts become conscious, drawing on decision-making research and embodied and ecological perspectives. The conversation connects neural activity and drift-diffusion models with unconscious and conscious thought, aiming to identify tractable directions for experimental consciousness research.

Alex Maier discusses consciousness through the lens of visual neurophysiology and integrated information theory. The conversation examines the appeal of a formal mathematical account, how it relates to experiments on perception and cortical organisation, and the challenges of developing laws for subjective experience.

Christof Koch discusses collaborative tests designed by proponents of competing consciousness theories and what the findings imply for those accounts.

Jennifer Prendki discusses whether progress in artificial intelligence requires ideas from living systems, embodiment and consciousness. Drawing on her background in particle physics and AI data curation, she examines the limits of scaling, possible roles for quantum physics, neural interfaces, alignment and the philosophical assumptions behind claims about general intelligence.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Rony Hirschhorn, Alex Lepauvre and Oscar Ferrante describe COGITATE's adversarial comparison of integrated information and global neuronal workspace theories. The conversation covers agreed predictions, a shared task measured with EEG, MEG and fMRI, evidence about location, duration and inter-area communication, and the practical difficulties of interpreting mixed results across competing theories.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Dean Buonomano discusses timing as a computational property of cortical circuits, including experiments training organotypic slices to predict temporal stimuli and replay sequences. The conversation also addresses the relationship between AI and neuroscience, agreements and tensions between physics and neuroscience about time, and his objections to integrated information theory as an account of consciousness.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Christof Koch discusses scientific approaches to conscious experience, including integrated information theory. This series edition revisits an earlier conversation.

Anil Seth discusses the scientific study of subjective experience and why perception can be described as controlled hallucination. He and Steven Strogatz consider the visual ambiguity of the dress, the relationship between brain activity and conscious experience, and public participation in mapping the diversity of human perception.

Hosted by Steven Strogatz

Christof Koch discusses scientific investigations of conscious experience and integrated information theory. Conversation in English.

Sean Carroll discusses interpretations of quantum theory and what physical explanations imply for consciousness and free will. Conversation in English.