Anil Seth

speaker

170 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 4 Aug

Anil Seth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea · Gold: How does the brain conjure consciousness? · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

in a specific situation, do a specific thing.

And if the causes of that thing, whether it's make tea or decide to get married or just lift up your finger, and it's a voluntary action that comes from within, that to me counts as the sort of free will worth having.

It's not the sort of free will that invokes some spooky, immaterial essence

of control that sweeps in from some other domain and changes the course of physical events in the world.

There's no need for that kind of free will at all.

We have all the free will we need because we can behave in a voluntary way.

There's many ways to do it, and they range from the...

Rigorous but rather dull sorts of experiments where we just put volunteers in front of computer screens and they look at images or simple stimuli like flashes of light or dots for thousands of times and we get them to make decisions about what they see.

And we can measure what's happening in their brains or we can just measure what they say they see or which buttons they press.

You can find out a lot that way.

There are newer approaches, too, which are less controllable, maybe less precise, but really exciting in the possibilities they offer.

We've been using virtual and augmented reality now for a number of years to get out of the lab and into the wild in a way where we can still actually do experiments, because with VR...

We can give people fully immersive experiences.

We can also recreate aspects of their own body in a virtual space so we can start studying how people experience the object in the world that they feel is their body.

And then we can also couple these things with all the fancy tools of neuroimaging and look at what's actually happening in the brain that underlies these sorts of experiences.

Absolutely, I would.

I think that's one of the main implications of a lot of this work.

And not only experimental neuroscience, but also psychiatry and neurology, all the books of Oliver Sacks that I read when I was much younger, just show the precarity of what a self is.

But just on that point about this thing called the rubber hand illusion, which...

is this very famous illusion whereby you can trick people into feeling that a fake hand is somehow part of their body.

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