In this episode of “Brain Inspired,” Paul Middlebrooks talks with Michael Shadlen, professor of neuroscience at Columbia University. Decades spent studying the neural basis of perceptual decision-making have informed Shadlen’s account of how consciousness emerges: Our brain is constantly interrogating the world, and subjective experience occurs only when those nonconscious questions can be reported to someone else or to ourselves. To that end, only organisms with theory of mind possess consciousness, he says.
Read the transcript.