Creating consciousness: Our brain's top-down, bottom-up framework for making sense of the world around & within us

Consciousness is a curious and complex phenomenon. There are many ideas about what consciousness means and how it comes about, but I came across a compelling and relatively simple argument when I attended TEDFest this year - where the TED2017 conference was livestreamed for TEDx conference organisers from around the world, all convened in New York. In this show I speak with Dr Anil Seth, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex in the UK. He is also Co-Director at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. We talk about how the brain tries to make sense of the world outside, but also integrates information coming from inside the body to help us perceive the world and our place in relation to it. We talk about the origin of emotions, mindfulness, mental illness and possible applications for the framework he proposes. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sarb-johal/message