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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

Actually, that's something that in my lab with my colleagues, Peter Lush and Zoltan Dienes, we've been studying a lot in the last couple of years, and the story's changed dramatically.

I now think of it very differently.

The thing about the rubber hand illusion and its extensions is that people actually know what they're expected to feel implicitly

what they're expected to experience in something like that.

Think about it.

You put a fake hand in front of someone, you stroke their hand with a paintbrush, you stroke the fake hand with a paintbrush at the same time, and you ask them, oh, does that feel like your hands?

It's pretty clear what's supposed to happen.

And then for a lot of people, it depends how suggestible you are.

There's this stable personality trait of hypnotic suggestibility.

The people that are quite high on it, they'll start to have that experience.

And the reason they're having it... So you're saying it's a suggested effect?

It's a suggestion effect.

Or rather, all the evidence out there so far is compatible with it just being a suggestion effect.

Now, this doesn't mean it's not real.

It is real.

And it still speaks to this observation that the experience of selfhood is very flexible.

But...

A lot of it might be down to how suggestible we are.

And this is actually a big challenge that we're facing in the study of consciousness, too, because a lot of our experiments, of course, they're about changing people's experience and seeing what happens.

And we've got to be very careful about suggestion effects, about leading people implicitly to know what experience we're hoping they have.

Showing 141–160 of 170 · page 8 of 9