Psychology professor Yuri Saalmann and colleagues at UW-Madison, University of Pennsylvania, Allen Institute for Brain Science, INSERM and Sorbonne University, have been awarded $3.5 million from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to investigate the neural basis of consciousness.
This is an “adversarial” collaboration, testing the different predictions made by leading theories of consciousness. The project will provide vital evidence that substantially supports or opposes a major theory on the nature of consciousness. This is achieved by two different labs performing the same components in a series of experiments, enabling cross-validation. The primate and mouse data from this project, combined with the parallel human project (recently covered in the journal Science), will yield a first-of-its-kind and freely available dataset for the neuroscience community.
August 11, 2021