Professor Anil Seth

Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience

Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience and Director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex. He is also Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Program on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness and a European Research Council Advanced Investigator. He has published more than 200 research papers and has been recognised by Web of Science, over several years, as being in the top 0.1% of researchers worldwide. His 2017 TED talk, Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality, has been viewed over fifteen million times. He was awarded the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize in 2023 and in 2014 he was listed by Prospect magazine as one of the top 25 global thinkers. His book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness was an instant Sunday Times bestseller and a 2021 book of the year for the Economist, New Statesman, Bloomberg Business, Guardian, and Financial Times.

He delivered the 2025 Humanists UK Voltaire Lecture, exploring the nature of consciousness in living organisms and related questions about whether artificial consciousness could ever exist. As part of the event, he was awarded Humanists UK’s inaugural Rationalist Press Lecture Medal.