A Day in the Life of the Brain: the neuroscience of consciousness from dawn 'til dusk [Audio]

Speaker(s): Baroness Greenfield | Consciousness is the ultimate miracle - and enigma. However most people take this subjective inner state for granted without ever reflecting on what could possibly be happening in their brain each day of their waking lives. This non-specialist talk will investigate this deeply fascinating question from the perspective of neuroscience, by exploring how objective events in the brain are realised as subjective experience. We follow a day in the life of a generic person (‘you’) as you wake up, walk the dog, have breakfast, work and return to a family with a variety of mental conditions. By the time we see ‘you’ ending your day in dreams, we will still not have solved how the water of objective brain mechanisms transform into the wine of subjective experience: but along the way we will have gained insights into cutting edge neuroscience, as well as contemplating the future of such research, for eventually really understanding consciousness. Susan Greenfield