Hallucination or Reality?
Tuesday, 30 November, 2021 12:00 pmZoom (online, register below)
How do we perceive the world? Is our reality just a series of controlled hallucinations? Anil Seth, PhD (University of Sussex), Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, will reveal the role hallucinations play in our reality, and explore the idea of the brain as a “prediction machine.” He will also explain the ways schizophrenics experience uncontrolled hallucinations, and how a deeper understanding of consciousness can impact the understanding and eventually treatment of mental illness.
Anil Seth
Anil K Seth 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 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 contributes regularly to many media including the New Scientist, The Guardian, and the BBC.
Within the Sackler Centre, his research interests include theoretical and computational models of consciousness; predictive coding and active inference; interoception, emotion and selfhood; virtual and augmented reality; time perception; Granger causality and time series analysis, and clinical studies of disorders of consciousness. Dr. Seth’s latest book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness was published on October 12, 2021.