Consciousness

Consciousness is one of the last outposts of pure mystery in our understanding of the brain. Undoubtedly there is plenty to learn about how the brain’s physiology controls our bodies, emotions and enables thoughts. Yet even these so-called easy problems are extraordinarily daunting, as scientists struggle to discern the detailed workings of sensory per­ception, memory, language, emotion and more. Then there are the puzzles associated with the brain’s ability to integrate all of this neural pro­cessing, producing a unified ‘self’ from the mul­titude of neuronal traffic. But where ‘we’ exist in our bodies, how we develop that sense of self and how it can be explained in terms of the activity of mere cells in our brain—all of that is still a mystery.