Our mission statement is to develop a collaborative effort to understand the nature of consciousness and its place in nature by developing and validating theoretically-motivated and clinically useful measures of consciousness.
Our strategy is to formulate and derive a principled, quantitative, comprehensive, and empirically testable account of what consciousness is; to understand mechanistically how consciousness is generated, altered, and lost in humans and animals; how it can be measured reliably in neurologically impaired patients, and whether and how it can be present in machines; and, finally, to explore the ethical, legal, philosophical and other societal implications of this knowledge.
Specifically, our aims include:
Aim 1 Develop a practical system with which to measure the presence and the quantity of consciousness
Aim 2: Establish which brain regions constitute the physical substrate of consciousness in the brain
Aim 3: Estimate states of consciousness from the ‘connectome’ of the human brain, and infer consciousness in animals, computers and groups of people, animals and computers
Aim 4: Grow a community of scholars, scientists and clinicians debating, testing and evaluating these ideas
We are currently working with a team of researchers from:
- The Allen Institute
- University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Massachusetts General Hospital
- University of California-Los Angeles
- Medical University of South Carolina
- University of Milan
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