“Can consciousness be seen as the key to understanding our surroundings and organizing our actions?” — David Edelman, PhD, Neuroscientist and Visiting Scholar in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College Ep 22: Consciousness Has an Integrative Function with Neuroscientist, David Edelman   Episode 22 of our podcast On Consciousness brings back neuroscientist David Edelman, who graciously hosted this discussion in the home of his late father, Nobel Laureate Gerald M. Edelman. Some have argued that consciousness is only a side effect of the brain, but from an ev ..read more

"Subjectivity and consciousness are the two main mysteries that science is still faced with. I'm an optimist. I believe that in the next half a century we might make progress on understanding consciousness."   - Stanley A. Klein, psychophysicist, professor of Vision Science and Optometry at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of the Berkeley Visual Processing Laboratory. Episode 21: The Duet of Physics & Psychology with Psychophysicist, Stanley Klein  In episode 21 of our podcast “On Consciousness” we welcome psychophysicist Stanley Klein, Professor of Vision Scie ..read more

The brain seeks meaning and patterns. It would be very adaptive to do so in nature, because you need to know how to predict danger and to develop social ties. So our brains are very good at recognizing patterns, but also at creating them, even when they're not there. - Dr. Jay Giedd, Chair of Child Psychiatry at Rady Children's Hospital - San Diego and Director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Professor of Psychiatry at UCSD School of Medicine, and Professor in the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. &nb ..read more

Studies show that, especially for young children, if you prematurely wake them up and deprive them of that much needed sleep, it becomes detrimental to their proper cognitive development further down in life. I just wonder about the amount of damage we're doing to kids with 7:20 AM school start times. - Ilian Daskalov, senior undergraduate student at University of California, Irvine   Ep 19: The Sleeping Brain: Better Than a Cup of Coffee This episode of the Podcast On Consciousness riffs on the discussion with Bernard Baars in Episode 18 on sleep, waking, connectivity, and global wo ..read more

"One of the major features of the Global Workspace hypothesis began with limited capacity, that there has to be a compensatory event in the brain happening, and the most plausible one, for various reasons, including other people's work, of course, was that there's some kind of very wide recruitment of brain resources that happens as a function of becoming conscious of something." – Dr. Bernard Baars, originator of Global Workspace Theory and Global Workspace Dynamics, a theory of human cognitive architecture, the cortex and consciousness. “Global Workspace Theory: Exploring Origins and Ev ..read more

"The idea is to help people understand how this science is relevant to their daily lives. Our brain likes novelty. It gets this sort of dopamine hit when you give it new information. Capturing attention and getting people excited about the information is really important, especially when dealing with things like public health issues, for example.” – Dr. Heather Berlin, Neuropsychologist and Assistant Clinical Professor at Mount Sinai   Episode 15: "Communicating Science Effectively and The Notion of Free Will" with Dr. Heather Berlin *On Consciousness*  For Episode #15, our returning ..read more

“In many cases you can see an immediate effect, as in chronic depression – suddenly you turn on the electrodes – you don't tell them when it's on or off, right? And their whole face lights up. And you ask, "What do you feel like?" And they say, "Oh, it feels wonderful. It feels like I won the lottery! It's so great!"   – Dr. Heather Berlin, Neuropsychologist and Assistant Clinical Professor at Mount Sinai   Episode 14: "Psychedelics, Impulsivity, and Brain Stimulation" with Dr. Heather Berlin *On Consciousness*    In this episode, our guest is neuropsychologist Dr. Heather ..read more

"The only way we get certainty or stability in the world is to start from what we know, and gradually move to what we don't know."   - Bernard Baars, PhD, originator of the Global Workspace Theory, a theory of cognitive architecture and consciousness.    Episode 13: "Thinking About Animal Consciousness"   The question of whether some non-human animals are capable of awareness has vexed psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers of mind for many decades. In the final episode of Season One of The Podcast On Consciousness, Bernard Baars and David Edelman attempt to ..read more

"Consciousness can be firmly embedded in biology, based on the fact that all kinds of [demonstrably biological] processes that are not [by themselves] conscious are important for conscious process[ing].”   - David Edelman, PhD, A neuroscientist and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College     Episode 12: "Consciousness in Context - The Brain is Embodied and the Body is Embedded"   In the 12th episode of ‘On Consciousness,’ psychobiologist Bernard Baars and neuroscientist David Edelman are joined by renowned mast ..read more

"Episodic memory involves conscious experiences being encoded. Same goes for semantic and autobiographical memories. All varieties of memories come in through conscious moments of recall. So, I think that consciousness is the means by which any kinds of memories are established." - Bernard Baars, PhD, originator of global workspace theory and global workspace dynamics, former Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, CA, editor in Chief of the Society for MindBrain Sciences, and a recipient of the 2019 Hermann von Helmholtz Life Contri ..read more