You'll never find "consciousness" in the brain , just as you won't find music in a radio. Consciousness is the listener, the one who hears the music , which is why its so difficult to explain. Its who you are , a conscious human being,

Shout out to the guy falling asleep at 38:21

Superb symposium of knowledgable minds.

Her introduction is quite long. I’m not complaining, I’m just impressed by how much she has done! Imagine having coffee with this woman! My god!

Well done, Barroness. I would enjoy hearing an updated lecture...to see what revelations and insights discovered in the interim decade.

Dr Jill Bolte Taylor, Neuroscientist, did a TEDTALK, March, 2012, explaining in detail what she experienced while having a stroke before and after she identified it as a stroke. Fascinating video. Try to watch it.

Great to see such an eloquent and articulate speaker make such a complex subject easier to understand . High energy and engaging throughout her presentation. May we continue to see more female professors in the currently male dominated world of academia. Well done Professor Greenfield.

Surfaces well and wonderfully scratched by a brilliant scientist that leaves us more knowing that we do not know and understanding that we do not understand. The panel and the moderator were great as well. Thanks!

What an absolutely brilliant presentation. Thanks so much for preparing it.

51:27 - heading toward the semi-conscious state.

Fascinating Panel Discussion - excellent framing of the discussion of an intriguing framing of areas begging consideration in attempting to solve "the hard problem." Thank you.

Other things to consider are... 1. The theory that consciousness is a product of brain computation has major explanatory gaps 2. Repeated studies showing that *manipulating consciousness with consciousness influences "hardwired" biological processes* (i.e., _gene expression, brain activity, blood pressure, heart rate, skin conductance,_ etc). The literature for this is already substantial and continues to accumulate. 3. The observation that consciousness can operate even when the brain is in a quiescent state, as demonstrated in a recent study done in England at Professor David Nut's lab. 4. For more updates on the lastest science concerning consciousness-brain dynamics, search *_hameroff on singularity consciousness_*

What a hypnotic speech, all put together with a lot of precision and tactics! It was hitting the exact cords with my brain. It's amazing.

I only understood like 30% of this, and I still really enjoyed this!

Fabulous! Hope the algorithm gives me more up to date progress on her research or similar.

Great speaker - I liked the attention to how we use the word and the distinctions made. It was refreshing to me to hear the subject discussed without reference to 20th century philosophy.

A great look into the hard problems of consciousness with special attention to the mid level area of neuronal assemblies, all described with a sense of humor. How rare and rewarding, indeed!

this is so good. it basically explains a big big piece of neuroscience in just 1.5 hours :) thank you very much!

Consciousness cannot be separated from its contents. Without contents, consciousness is just an abstraction, a concept, a word, a bit of jargon.

This video has been up over two years and I think it is brilliant; and is just as brilliant now in 2015 as it was in the fall of 2012. I'm one of those folks who thinks of this problem from the computational / mathematical side of things. I think of this in terms of models, so I thought that Professor Greenfield made a very good point about models. If we could construct one that did a 'perfect' job of modeling consciousness then we would truly be 'done-and-done'. My ideas about consciousness and models are more on the level of not how the mind works but instead what the mind does. And when you leave off the how and concentrate on the what is is pretty easy to say that the mind is 'at-the-very-least' an engine that takes the sensory inputs of an organism and constructs a model that when run dictates the actions of the organism. So in the case of motile organisms this, "model-making" is used to predict what the next sensory inputs will be so that the organism can successfully negotiate its environment. I think that consciousness as an attribute that humans and other 'conscious' organisms have will come to be seen as a completely emergent attribute of this 'model-making-mind' and the 'amount/level' of it will be tied to the 'size/complexity' of the brain itself. Additionally I think that consciousness and intelligence can also be thought of as an emergent property of an organisms ability to communicate, or to be a 'social' organism. Also, when we fully account for the only tool we have to explore these ideas is our own minds then the importance of self and consciousness will not seem quite as important as we now take it to be. This downgrading of importance will certainly be a byproduct of the advent of A.I. when and if we manage to create such a thing.

That was phenomenal.How well structured a presentation of such a complex issue.

" I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going...There is no question about it. "

This is fascinating…so are the public comments. I want to keep this video to play in the comments. Ty.

Brilliant lecturer, will definitely look up her books.

She's very smart and funny. We need more like her. Her approach to quantifying consciousness is worth while. However the Hard Problem wasn't touched here at all. Consciousness is much like gravity, even though Isaac Newton gave a good explanation of how it work. He didn't know what gravity really is. It wasn't until Einstein's paradigm shift and the notion of space-time curvature that we understood gravity.

There is a difference between studying brain and studying consciousness. In the first case we can apply third-person approach (we are here, while our object of study is out there), while when studying consciousness, we have to apply first-person approach. I mean that we have to use our exemplar of consciousness simultaneously as an object of study and a tool of studying. Neurophysiology applies third-person approach, therefore it studies brain, but it does not study consciousness. To formalize brain, we apply decompositional approach and physical models. It is the same as we investigate how the wall clock works: we disassemble it into parts and then see how these parts work when being put together. So, we can count the number of brain's parts, weight and measure their size, and determine their spatial locations. However, to study consciousness we have to apply the informational models, which means that such concepts as spatial location, weight, size, etc. have already no sense. Therefore, the question where consciousness sits is not correct in principle.

Such interesting topic. I'd like to hear Baroness Susan Greenfield CBE talk with Dr. Jack Kruse.

I appreciate the clear manner in which the initial premises of this talk have been presented. It's honest and very much to the point. But I'm also inclined to dispute a couple of them, which leads to somewhat different conclusions. 1) Consciousness can't be clearly defined or classified. It fails to be captured by either referral or operational definitions. Well, yes it can, if we're prepared to distinguish it quite particularly. If we only give a hand wave to something so broad as to be necessarily ineffable and mysterious, then of course that would be difficult to define. But what if we were to qualify consciousness more narrowly? Consider consciousness as a rarely found function of a more general category named cognition. (This is clearly a definition by referral.) Cognitive function spans anything neurological really, from the simplest neural response to stimuli to simple internal state which models and learns from experience, and thence to more general memory and planning functions based on state, and so on. None of this requires consciousness, but it represents ever more elaborate cognitive machinery as we move up the evolutionary scale from simple to complex organisms. It may take place in neurological hardware, or in the software of neural connections or other dynamic state. I don't think that's definitionally of concern, though technically there is the additional challenge that software is very hard to understand by inspecting hardware. Consciousness, as I'd like to define it, has particular features which distinguish it from general cognition. Most importantly, the internal model is to some degree interrogable. (This is clearly a definition by operation.) Without this feature, we have only "unconscious" general cognition: something entirely sufficient to account for a gradient of simple to complex behavior in all sorts of species. With the evolutionary development of this one simple feature, we could, for the first time, notice what it is that we're doing not just with our hands, say, but also with our thoughts. This may by itself have been enough to bootstrap the development of our present apparatus of consciousness, or that may have had to await some other features such as language or theory of mind. It may require some additional features of language such as abstraction, or perhaps basic interrogability or introspection is instead a cognitive precursor to abstraction. We don't know at present, but these are in principle falsifiable hypotheses. 2) Consciousness is inherently a hard problem because of both the emergence of subjective experience and the difficulty of correlating subjective experience with objective measurables. This is a subtle fallacy of composition, made worse because we tend to conflate the investigation of unconscious general cognition with the very specialized features of consciousness. Why do we do this? Well, first because it's very hard to deduce the architecture of software if we can only look at the hardware. The neurological approach to consciousness has some limitations here. But the introspective approach is hardly better. Our consciousness itself is the problem here. Because we can only introspect consciously, the rest of our cognitive activity appears mysterious. It's like being in a vast darkened room with a small flashlight (and a short attention span.) Everywhere we look with the flashlight appears real and substantial at a given moment, but falls out of reckoning when we look elsewhere. 3) Metacognition (introspection) is to be excluded from consideration in developing a treatment of consciousness. This is a profoundly questionable choice. In my view it is very nearly this specific distinction which makes the hard problem of consciousness tractable, because we're then no longer conflating two qualitatively distinct capabilities and becoming baffled because they don't seem to add up. Most of our cognitive functioning is unconscious, there's no dispute about that. In other species, even more is unconscious, perhaps all. So we don't have to account for consciousness as an underlying imperative, a substrate to all of cognition. It's a very specialized feature, and it specifically has to do with introspection and the entire new internal field of attention which that in turn facilitates. Without it, we literally can't begin to say that there is something called consciousness. And we are not in fact conscious until we know that we are. Prior to that moment we're passengers on the train with no idea that there is a driver, much less that we are at least potentially that driver. From this perspective, the problem of consciousness is very straightforward.

I was once wiggling a broken molar while I had a few days to wait for my appointment to get it removed. It was painful with that constant bad toothache that nothing non-prescription really helps with. The pain seemed to lessen while it was being moved about. You see where this is going.... I only felt a deep pain at the point of breaking out the main last bit of root but it was still a lesser pain than the toothache. The relief was instant and then the endorphin + dopamine high was about the same as getting a fair size tattoo. It was just an unconscious reaction messing with the tooth reduce the pain I was in, and the thought to bust it out was also a very casual thought. It was as if my brain had decided without letting me know to remove the source of pain and then guided my actions in a state of lesser awareness. It was a very strange one-off that has always made me think that what we experience is what our brains think we need to experience.

It seems to be the case now that modulating consciousness (i.e., subjectivity) can/does affect biological and neurological functions in significant and measurable ways. That's an interesting scientific discovery. I wonder what else we'll learn about the nature of consciousness. Maybe it's not even being generated by the brain at all.

She is only dealing with the soft problem of consciousness not the hard problem of consciousness.. This is quite easy for me to understand.

Great to hear a scientist who does not talk down to the audience. "Let us assume the null hypothesis." Many thanks for this lecture. How to define consciousness. The operational definition given in this lecture is good enough for me. It's what we experience when we first wake up. The significance of the distinction between consciousness and self consciousness interests me. A child is conscious for many months before being able to recognize herself in a mirror, an indication of self-consciousness. Some animals can and others cannot recognize themselves in mirrors. Consciousness is a pre-condition for self-consciousness. But absence of self-consciousness is not evidence of the absence of consciousness. After following the literature on primates for 20 years, I find it hard to accept that consciousness is unique to humans. There is too much evidence from animal studies to the contrary. I recently read Franz de Waal's book The Bonobo and the Atheist and drew from his observations that the key may be empathy, a point mentioned in the Scientific American article (reference below), "Based on results with Western children, psychologists have linked the age humans start passing the mark test with other milestones that happen around the same time, such as development of empathy." (I cannot find the precise source Maggie Koerth-Baker used for her statement.) Koerth-Baker, M, Kids (and Animals) Who Fail Classic Mirror Tests May Still Have Sense of Self, Scientific American Nov. 2010 www.scientificamerican.com/article/kids-and-animals-who-fail-classic-mirror/ The following is the study mentioned in the Scientific American article: Broesch, T., Callaghan, T., Henrich, J., Murphy, C., & Rochat, P. (2010). Cultural variations in children’s mirror self-recognition. Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology, 1-13. Full text: tinyurl.com/p8dmt3d Rochat P, Broesch T and Jaynea K, Social awareness and early self-recognition (2012), doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2012.04.007 Full text: student.cc.uoc.gr/uploadFiles/179-%CE%9A%CE%A8%CE%92364/early%20self-recognition.pdf I have saved this lecture as a video to watch again and extracted an audio file which I will put on my mobile phone to listen to more carefully. Software: Pazera Free Audio Extractor v.2.9. Many thanks.

Wow this was very powerful and had my full attention. I only wish it could have been longer. It's such a blessing to have been blessed with this video. I'm really In a state of awe..... God bless you all and I'm currently reading the human mind explained by Susan Greenfield. It's a great book. I was unaware of her genius mind... she's totally an inspiration for me. Please continue to do all that you do. Thank U 😊 and God bless

i did enjoy this very much

I really like the editing and camera work with respect to the audience. A very interesting body language dialogue, ambiguous at best, is going on; as interesting as the lecturer's topic. Ms. Greenfield's only weakness is that she comes at her audience like a locomotive. But, obviously,her focus is on the material and not show business... and that is as it should be.

Belief starts even before you are born, the vibration of your parents voice has a foundation stone that can be a smooth rhythm and energy that develops a balanced brain, or it can be a destruction of these wavelengths that tips the balance of the brain being developed through the conciousness, that will be there for the rest of their lives.

I really like this woman! Can we hang out & have some tea, sometime? Thank you, Baroness Greenfield, for this wonderful lecture.

Where does cold end and hot begin on a thermometer? 100% agree consciousness is some type of gradient.

Very informative and well presented.

Brilliant presentation.

I remember becoming conscious as me as a separate person, separate from my environment and from other people. I may have been 2 years old, old enough to walk. I was walking with my dad, and all of a sudden it was like coming out of a fog, some blotches becoming colorful and I realized that yes, there was my dad, but I realized there was me as something, someone separate from what I had been seeing all along. This experience stuck in my mind, because it was like an aha moment.

This is so thought provoking and enlightening. Thank you very very much. new subscriber

Outstanding lecture 👍🏿👏🏿👌🏾

I highly suggest studying Professor Antonio Damasio's Theory of Consciousness especially the Three Layers of Consciousness (Proto Self, Core Consciousness, and the Extended Self).

I LOVE HER LECTURING SKILLS SHES SO ENTERTAING AS A LECTURER

13:17 priceless static face!

Consciousness is the ability to look and understand and predict and reject and say "No!". Consciousness is also objective and subjective, an infinite regress of subjectivities. Consciousness itself is a subject of consciousness.

If the brain generates consciousness then how do people have experiences as if they’re out of the body? I’m asking because I’ve had at least one experience like that where I was able to see what literally happened 3000 miles away on the other side of the United States on a matter that I wasn’t even thinking about. Yet it was confirmed by a friend who rented an area in that building. My experience is not unique. I’ve known many who have had these kinds of experiences. But they don’t talk about it because they’re afraid of being stereotyped and marginalized.

Engineers know that a problems that appear as complex are actually a combination of many simple problems. For example, when a software seems to behave erratically in some random time, the solution often is caused by a few subtle mistakes, some of which are benign as is but contribute to hide the root cause. Consciousness is a word with many distinct meanings... about 26 according to one of the panelist in a different video on the subject. Once we take time to define each clearly which meaning we want to explain, the solution is much more easy to find. Interesting questions discussed by Baroness Susan Greenfield is: when does consciousness appear in human. After birth? When the egg is fertilized? The answer she gave is very elegant. She said that consciousness is not a binary number, it is not just "All there" or "completely absent". It is more like a dimmer than a ON?OFF switch (even though dimmers are made with TRIACS which are really just ON?OFF switch with capacity to turn ON at sub-millisecond precision). Consciousness can only exist when a large collection of neuron exist, so, an embryo with only the neural tube is clearly unable to think or be conscious. A jelly fish with a few hundreds neurons is only conscious of day light and gradient of nutrients. The mammals with their frontal cortex are more conscious then other species without this advanced structure. It is still possible that Octopus with their distributed computing model, birds and other animals developed nonetheless some form of consciousness. Adult humans in good health presumably rank very high on the scale. Unfortunately, when diseases, strokes or accident damage the brain, they may not be the same person anymore since "my memory is me, if it get erased I die" as said the robot Number 5 in the second movie Short Circuit.

So clearly explained Really helpful.

We have much to achieve in Neuroscience and just like astronomy, it is an endless science but as long as we exist on this Earth Neuroscience always has progress to be attained.

This is a great presentation yet it shows just how much we don't know about our own brain and consciousness. I look forward to seeing how our progress with AI influences our interpretation of actual consciousness in our lifetime.

How about Microtubules quantum vibration being the seat of consciousness?

Very informative :) Enjoyed every second of it.

She rushes through a lot of interesting things near the end of the lecture (58:00) but otherwise she explains and reasons very well, easy to understand even for a non-neurologist. I'd love her to correlate "hard problem: awake vs dreaming" with "hard problem: alive vs dead" problems, because life (or should I say "alive-ness") also seem to be on a gradient. Off topic, I find the dress distracting. But then, this is a good lecture, logically and communicatively superb!

19:05min What about the process of reactivating the brain. At what point in waking up from sedation consciousness, and self-consciousness begin to arise? Those seem to be legit questions.

You should see the short video " WTF Bending A Mans Mind " Great social psychology video.

Consciousness is being aware of matter, concepts and events. It is riding on the cloud of flowing time.............

I am not a scientist but i like the music of science and this lady is a great musician I love her music.

Ask three questions from yourself after waking from a dream. 1. The observer of my dream was conscious or unconscious? 2. The observer of my dream was in my dream or in the universe? 3. Is the observer of my dream still conscious? If so then where? Answers of these questions will enable us to understand that consciousness exists independent of brain.

Phenomena = plural Phenomenon = singular Why is this so difficult to get?

At 26.45. This neural spark, the spikes on the chart are the same waveform as John Bedini uses in his very efficient battery charger/motor. A wheel passes a magnet over a coil, it is the collapsing magnetic field, the inductance of the coil, turned to 'back emf' which provides the spike. Its very efficient, no heating, it de-sulphates batteries from the dead. Seemingly keeps people from being dead too. Bedini is calling it Radiant Energy, as Nicola Tesla did, or longitudinal. It is the linear momentum component, the square root, of scalar charge. See Tetryonics and be at the front of the wave.

Susan is my new hero!

theres a guy passing out 51:28

1:15:20 "Should we develop a drug for a normal person to increase their memory?" It is a hard to believe that anyone should even pose this question (let alone someone who supposedly knows something about the brain) given the massive evidence for neuroplasticity of the last 30 years or so. It is proven that certain methods (see the work of Barbara Arrowsmith and Norman Doidge for example) prove beyond all doubt improve memory and other abilities. The only reason that humanity en masse doesn't know about this is because the pharmaceutical industry makes bucket loads of money selling us their drugs. Teaching people natural methods to enhance their memory and many other skills wouldn't be in the interests of the pharmaceutical industry. That is why they will have no interest in the above mentioned studies (of Arrowsmith, Doidge, Mezernich etc.). Please anyone who doubts this take a look at these authors. I am angered that despite this knowledge having been around for some time hardly anyone knows about it.

I find her very astute and well spoken, as to the substance, I don't know enough to take a position on what "mind" is.

Consciousness is the awakened state of knowing, (subjectively) that you exist in a world of duality and that drawing a line between the two poles is our purpose.

Consciousness CAN be defined, how about: "Existence exists, and something (consciousness) exists to make that observation". That's it, now lets move on! With respect and admiration for Prof. Greenfield.

The question is: Is intelligence the factor which leads us to this answer ;-)

Statistical measuring the experiences through the senses for their volume, frequencies, patterns, durations can assist the recording of the personal experiences. Variations of individual sensory levels should also be considered.

I wish all my instructors spoke this quickly and cogently.

the video has this incredibly annoying high pitch sound ALWAYS playing on the background.

Why on earth is a theologian commenting on neuroscience???

Consciousness is when you yourself exist in your model of the world. Self awareness is consciousness.

Consciousness is a survival skill. It is present in many creatures as we all know, the only difference we have is words. We have a voice to go with the pictures, other creatures speak to themselves in pictures with their noises and calls still attached. You've all seen a dog/cat/bird dreaming? You hear them "talking" in their sleep. Anyway, its a survival tool/skill. Clearly our constant any varied forms of competition and conflict drove the human consciousness to the N'th degree.

Not a single mention of Tononi's Phi, or perhaps she thought she touched on it by mentioning "pan-psychism."

51:25 Oh no, a gentleman losing consciousness!

Very well done. I am about as unscientific as one can be yet I understood it all...

Susan Greenfield’s claim on unique experience rather meanswhat she can describe may not be the same as someone else may describe. While this is true of a point-of-view - since no 2 people can be in the same place at the same time, and everything is in a continuous state of evolution - it is not necessarily true to say we cannot share the same experience as another person. I know my experience of agreement is shared by my daughter, Kandy, and I know she would agree. Now this shared agreement does of course include external observations, but it is not limited or confined by external observation or spatial location - she is in New York, I am in the UK - it does relate to understanding the nature and substance of agreement. I know, as a fiddle-player that I can and do share the same experience of appreciation as my tutor, as and when I am ‘in-tune’ with him, and reading the score truly, not just the dots. By the same token, my experience is enhanced far more than when I play alone; which validates my claim that two-or-more in agreement enables greater performance potential to be realised than is possible in isolation. I’m sure that is at least one valid reason why we are not alone.

"The problem is... you have a bunch of pretty scans of the brain, and they think it tells you about behavior.... it doesn't" - Dr. Carl Hart in 2014, neuroscientist and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Columbia University school of Medicine

51:27 .... that guy is definitely not in a state of couciousness.

If, in the ages of time, I find myself here and conscious. I can only conclude that I am, at least often, if not always, 'here' and conscious.

We give too little SCIENTIFIC (in a widened sense) focus onto the conciousness being more fundamental than matter (brain). We waste a lot of time for development but sure learn a lot for the present mechanics of elongate and improve our biological (material) existance. Makes some of us happy(er) for some time.

The guy sleeping at 0:51:31

I'm not sure if the actual question of conciousness has been identified in this talk. You may like to describe in minute detail what conciousness is, but it would be difficult to communicate what it is actually like to be another person. This is not experience per se that we aim for but the experience of experience, which is a more difficult problem. I think though that all of this eventually falls flat on its face by hard determinism. If one thinks (and I see no evidence for anything else) that all things in the universe are linked by a causal relation then it must follow that we (whatever that is) have absolutely no choice on what we do OR what we think. If on the other hand true randomness happens in some proportion in the universe, this also means that we have no control over our actions and what we think. The unfortunate concequence of this is that we shall remain forever prisoners of this existence - and discussions about anything at all must be resigned to entertainment purposes only. I don't think that even the cleverest people stop to ponder the concequences of determinsm, otherwise they would give up any serious persuit that involves reaching any conclusions on reality as being utterly futile.One might say "well look, our thinking and methodology seems to make great benefits for us - take for example advances in medince, we must be geting something right because we can see the real effects'. I would say to this - 'well you would think that wouldn't you as you have no choice.'

I LOVE her! Consciousness is not the most stimulating subject for a talk.

A year ago I had a major knee repair surgery after I ripped my tendon clean from the bone. I told my anesthesiologist that as an algorithm engineer I did my graduate work in applied math in computational neuroscience and I don't want her to rely on a bi-spectrum metric from frontal eeg. to determine if I am feeling this. After the surgery I told her of the intense dream I had of being in a waiting area that was like a bar. It was not blank. I think we deal with mind activity just not being recorded so we lose the stream. I see this when I wake from intense REM where I have the dream and it slowly fades as wake state takes over. I think wake is like a code and REM is a different code and they don't merge. My proof is that when I fall asleep and in that early hypnogogic state the previous REM dream kind of comes back. That stream is still alive.

If you're going to push the idea that _consciousness emerges from the brain_, then, as a minimum, you will have to bring a biological definition of consciousness to predicate that idea. If you don't, then it means you're trying to talk about consciousness/subjectivity as a physical-material phenomenon without defining it in physical or biological terms. Brain is definitely involved with consciousness. But it's a pretty big leap to then jump to the conclusion that the brain _does_ consciousness. The thing to keep in mind is that the materialist view doesn't provide a biological definition of consciousness that would explain how you get subjectivity out of chemicals/matter, nor do they provide any observations (or make predictions) showing where subjectivity emerges from matter.

".....how the brain generates consciousness''. It doesn't. The brain acts as a receiver and filter of consciousness. It doesn't produce consciousness.

Consciousness is the awareness of soul!

Never seen such a diverse audience at a lecture on consciousness

Oh my... this is so narrow a view, it could hardly represent consciousness!. :) How is it a "system" ? A system is a reductive series of processes that needs to be designed for a specific purpose / task. That is definitely not consciousness. Consciousness just is. It's the medium in which you do all your focussing in. But it's still there when you're not focussing.

Theologian on the panel? where's the witch doctor, Scientologist and voodoo practioner, I want to hear there views too.

This really is wonderful.

I love listening to this!

Very clever woman, but who the hell let her buy that dress?

In the future we will be able to download our consciousness onto a usb memory stick.

You can define consciousness, in a way, It is the product of the mind's apperception of a previous perception, (Leibniz)

Thank you for this talk

Here's the difference between the scientist's attitude and the theologian's...the scientist says "we don't know" and the theologian says "oh yes as expected we all have souls" and goes on to make other unsupported conclusions...wait when did the scientist say we have souls? when is humanity going to wake up?