Anil Seth

Scientist, Writer/Editor

Anil Seth is a neuroscientist and author who has pioneered research into the brain basis of consciousness for more than twenty-five years. Right now he is most interested in one of the key questions of our time: could AI be, or become, conscious? His recent essay "The Mythology of Conscious AI" won the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition (selected from over 3,000 submissions). Research in his lab covers this topic and many others, including the nature of perception, how to measure emergence, and stroboscopically-induced visual hallucinations (he was the lead scientist on Dreamachine in which ~40,000 people had powerful hallucinations, all in the name of science). Anil is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience and Director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex, Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Program on Brain, Mind and Consciousness. He has published more than 200 research papers and has been recognized by Web of Science, over several years, as being in the top 0.1% of researchers worldwide. In 2023 he was awarded the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize; in 2024 Prospect Magazine listed him as one of the Top 25 global thinkers for 2024, and 2025 the UK Humanist Association awarded him their Rationalist Press medal. His book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness was an instant Sunday Times Bestseller and a 2021 Book of the Year for The Economist, The New Statesman, Bloomberg Business, The Guardian, The Financial Times and elsewhere.

The brain and consciousness; public engagement in science

I predict myself, therefore I am

artificial intelligence, consciousness, neuroscience

Speaker in 2026 and 2017, attendee in 2018 and 2024, summit 2019. Also TED interview (live with Chris Anderson), TED Radio Hour, and TED-Ed, and TED-everything-else.

playing piano badly