Anil Seth

Profile – Anil Seth (b. 1972)

Anil Seth grew up in Oxfordshire, England, before studying at Cambridge for his first degree, in natural sciences, and Sussex for his DPhil (PhD), in computer science and artificial intelligence. He then spent several years as a postdoctoral researcher with the Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman in San Diego before returning to the University of Sussex in the mid-2000s, where he is now Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience and Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science. His research interests range from developing measures of causality, emergence, and complexity, to exploring the brain basis of hallucinations and other unusual experiences, to measuring ‘perceptual diversity’ in large groups of people. He is known for proposing the ‘beast machine’ theory of consciousness, according to which all conscious experiences are forms of perceptual prediction that are ultimately grounded in regulation and control of the body. He is the author of the bestselling Being You—A New Science of Consciousness (2021a), his 2017 TED talk has been viewed over 13million times, and he is the lead scientist on Dreamachine, a project that allowed over 35,000 people (to date) to experience stroboscopically induced visual hallucinations. He loves to play the piano, hike, and surf—but the waves in Brighton aren’t as good as they were in San Diego.