What weighs three pounds and has ten billion electrical connections? Hint: it is not the CIA’s most powerful laptop computer. Another hint: it contains 100 billion nerves.
It is the human brain — an object that looks remarkably the same in all of us yet houses our sense of our own uniqueness — our consciousness. Defining consciousness has been the frustrating quest of philosophers for centuries — philosophy students console themselves with the joke that consciousness is what we lose when we go to sleep and get back in the morning when we wake up.
Leaving the mind-body problem behind, the serious search for consciousness has now shifted to the neurosciences. Their definition of consciousness is not an abstract — it is a physical property which can be located in that three pound mass inside our skulls. Scientists are plotting the connections in the brain, looking for the elusive place where the self resides.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Susan Greenfield, neurobiologist and author of The Private Life of the Brain.