W hat is it like to be you? To wake up every morning, look at yourself in the mirror, and go about your daily life? What is it like to think all the things you think, to feel all the things you feel? It must be at least somewhat different from being me: whoever you are, you have your own history, your own experiences, your own memories, thoughts, and desires. Your own life. Your own sense of being you. And so we come to arguably the biggest mystery of the human brain: consciousness—our subjective experience of the world and all its perceptual contents, including sights, sounds, thoughts, and sensations. It is a private inner universe that utterly disappears in states such as general anesthesia or dreamless sleep. It is something so mysterious that we still find it notoriously difficult to understand or even define. Many have tried. In his famous 1974 essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, the American philosopher Thomas Nagel asks us to imagine changing places with a bat. His interest
Via these blogs you will probe into different aspects of the human brain in light of neuroscience.