Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Keynote 2: Rees

Wednesday, July 4 2012 09:15-10:30 @ Dome theatre

Keynote 1: "Decoding consciousness"

Geraint Rees (University College London, UK)

SUMMARY

Everything we know about the world comes to us through our brain. Yet for each of us our own conscious mental world of thoughts and feelings is isolated and private. Despite several centuries of research on the brain, communication through language or gesture remains the only way we can discover the conscious thoughts and experiences of others. This makes it difficult to compare our conscious experiences and discover whether we all experience the world in the same way. In this talk I will discuss recent work using non-invasive brain imaging showing that not only does our conscious perception of the world differ across individuals, but also that these individual differences are correlated with the structure and function of primary visual, parietal and prefrontal cortices. I will explore the implications of these findings for both neuroscience and society.

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