Prof. Anil Seth (Co-Director)
Anil K Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and Founding Co-Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science. He is Editor-in-Chief of Neuroscience of Consciousness (Oxford University Press) and was Conference Chair of the 16th Meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC16, 2012). He has published more than 100 academic papers in a variety of fields, and he holds degrees in Natural Sciences (MA, Cambridge, 1994), Knowledge-Based Systems (M.Sc., Sussex, 1996) and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (D.Phil., Sussex, 2000). He was also a Postdoctoral and then Associate Fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, where we worked with Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman (2001-2006). Anil is Editor and Co-Author of 30 Second Brain (Ivy Press, 2014), was Consultant for Eye Benders (Ivy Press, 2013; winner of the Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize 2014) and contributes regularly to many media including the New Scientist, The Guardian, and the BBC.
Within SCCS, his research interests include theoretical and computational models of consciousness; predictive coding and active inference; interoception, emotion and selfhood; virtual and augmented reality; time perception; Granger causality and time series analysis, and clinical studies of disorders of consciousness.
More information about Prof Anil Seth. Follow me on Twitter at @anilkseth, and take a look at my Blog, NeuroBanter.
Prof. Hugo Critchley (Co-Director)
Hugo trained in Physiology and Medicine in the University of Liverpool and received his doctorate in Psychological Studies at the University of Oxford. He undertook specialist training in psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry and the Institute of Neurology, in parallel with research fellowships including a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in Clinical Science, awarded 2004. Before his appointment at BSMS, he was a principal investigator at the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, UCL Institute of Neurology and group leader at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. Hugo’s research is now funded mainly by the European Research Council.
Within SCCS, Hugo heads the Psychiatry group. The Centre extends the research focus on interoceptive awareness (consciousness of internal bodily state) and control of bodily arousal to examine the brain mechanisms through which they impact on mental and physical health. In parallel with neuroimaging, autonomic psychophysiology will be developed as a functional marker of conscious awareness and to enrich our explanatory account of the representation of self as an agent. This work will merge with the clinical focus on dissociative symptoms such as derealization and depersonalization in psychosis, epilepsy and anxiety states led by Dr Nick Medford.
More information about Prof Hugo Critchley.