Webinar Series: The Consciousness Conundrum

OUPS Webinar Series 2027

Speaker: Peter Naish

Most of us, most of the time, don’t give a second thought to what I call a conundrum. Our brains just do their thing and we get on with making use of their wonderful ability to analyse our world, enable us to communicate with others, etc. Those abilities are very impressive, but they are simply what the human brain has evolved to do. Where this starts to get more interesting is when we observe that a great deal of brain activity goes on without our knowledge. For example, we are completely unaware of the mechanisms taking place when we see, and then recognise, a familiar face. Even this is not too amazing in these days of computerised facial recognition. The really puzzling bit is that we have a sense of awareness of some of what the brain achieves. How can that be? Computers…