The MIT Consciousness Club, led by professors Matthias Michel and Earl Miller, explores how neurological activity gives rise to human experience.

The MIT Consciousness Club, led by professors Matthias Michel and Earl Miller, explores how neurological activity gives rise to human experience.

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Blindsight patients lack conscious visual perception yet perform visual tasks effectively, suggesting many animals may similarly rely on non-conscious vision. Here, we discuss how to investigate visua...

The MIT Consciousness Club aims to foster interdisciplinary research on consciousness at MIT and in the broader Boston area by organizing a monthly event featuring an expert talk on consciousness foll...

The MIT Consciousness Club aims to foster interdisciplinary research on consciousness at MIT and in the broader Boston area by organizing a monthly event featuring an expert talk on consciousness foll...

Rapid progress in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities has drawn fresh attention to the prospect of consciousness in AI. There is an urgent need …

Research in primate brains has been essential for the development of BCIs, ANNs. New funding and policy changes put future such advances at risk.

We investigated whether binocularly conflicting stimuli adapted from primate binocular rivalry studies could induce binocular response suppression in mouse visual cortex. We presented binocularly conf...

Abstract. The role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in consciousness is hotly debated. Frontal theories argue that the PFC is necessary for consciousness, wh

Illumination is a defining characteristic of natural environments, yet its nature and spatial structure remain poorly understood. I argue first that illumination is not simply light: it is an emergen...

The typical conception of working memory is a mechanism to temporarily hold multiple discrete objects in service of other cognitive tasks in an item-b…

I argue that there is currently no alternative to functionalism. Functionalism explains the differences between types of mental states. No biological theory does. Functionalist theories account for th...

Perceptual experience depends on recurrent interactions between lower and higher cortices. One theory, predictive coding, posits that feedback from higher to lower brain regions decreases neuronal activity predicted by higher-level representations. Despite the widespread adoption of predictive coding in neuroscience, the correspondence to neurophysiological findings in sensory cortices remains elusive. Here, we review how the canonical patterns of intra- and inter-cortical interactions that occur during perception and shifts of attention deviate from those predicted by predictive coding. We argue that these circuit interactions are better captured by alternative theories, which we summarize under the umbrella term BELIEF. We review how BELIEF theories account for the inter-areal interactions during attentive perception.

The academic study of philosophy tends to inspire contempt, from within and from without. Stephen Hawking’s pompous pronouncement in 2010 that “philosophy is dead” is just one version of a…