Season Two - Episode 7 - Anil Seth

Attend Anil's upcoming lecture on 26/03/24 here

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Anil's book recommendation: Piranesi - Susanna Clarke

With more than two decades of research and outreach experience, Anil’s mission is to advance the science of consciousness and to use its insights for the benefit of society, technology and medicine. An internationally leading researcher, Anil is also a renowned public speaker, best-selling author, and sought-after collaborator. 

 

Anil is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience and Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex, Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Program on Brain, Mind and Consciousness, a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Investigator, and Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal Neuroscience of Consciousness (Oxford University Press). He has published more than 200 research papers in a variety of fields, is recognized as being in the top 0.1% of researchers worldwide (2019-2023, Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher) and was named as in the Top 50 Innovators by World Summit AI (2022). He holds degrees in Natural Sciences (MA, Cambridge), Knowledge-Based Systems (MSc, Sussex), and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (Ph.D., Sussex). He carried out his postdoctoral work in San Diego with the Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman. 

 

Anil’s book - Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (Faber/Dutton, 2021) – was an instant Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller and was a 2021 Book of the Year for The Guardian, The Economist, The New Statesman, Bloomberg Business, and a 2021 Science Book of the Year for The Guardian and The Financial Times. 

In 2023 he won the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize, awarded annually to the scientist or engineer whose expertise in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms is exemplary. Prospect Magazine listed him as one of 25 top global thinkers for 2024. Anil’s main-stage TED talk has been viewed over fourteen million times and is one of their most popular science talks. He was the 2017 President of the British Science Association (Psychology Section) and the 2019 winner of the KidSpirit Perspectives award. He has featured in many high-profile podcasts (including Sam Harris, Rangan Chatterjee). He has appeared in several films (The Most Unknown, The Search), appears regularly on BBC Radio (Life Scientific, Inside Science, Today Programme, etc), and has written for Aeon, The Guardian, Granta, New Scientist, and Scientific American, among other venues. His other books include 30 Second Brain (Ivy Press, 2014) and EyeBenders (with Clive Gifford, winner of the 2015 Royal Society Young Person’s Book Prize), and he has collaborated on a wide range of art-science projects from drama (Elegy, Nick Payne) to rap (The Rap Guide to Consciousness, with Baba Brinkman), and is lead scientist on the groundbreaking immersive science-art experience Dreamachine, which won the 2023 CogX Best Innovation in Creative Arts award and the 2023 Lumen Immersive Environment Award.