Anil Seth Speaker Biography

Speaker Anil Seth is a leading researcher, writer, and public engagement specialist in consciousness science, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. He has broad experience of communicating new ideas from the forefront of research in these areas, which confront some of humanity’s greatest questions and challenges.

In his scientific work, Anil seeks to understand the biological basis of consciousness by integrating research across many different disciplines from mathematics to virtual reality to cognitive neuroscience and psychiatry.

As well as pioneering this interdisciplinary approach, he is recognised for his influential theories about how conscious experiences of the world and self are forms of ‘controlled hallucinations’. His work emphasizes impact, driving fresh approaches to psychiatric disorders, shaping the development of neuroscientically-informed technologies in AI and beyond, and inspiring creative work in art and culture.

Anil Seth is a sought-after keynote speaker. His 2017 TED talk was rated by Wired as a ‘classic’ of the year and has been viewed over 7 million times since July 2017. He has given invited presentations at venues ranging from reclaimed bunkers in London to the Royal Institution Friday Discourse, and he is equally at home talking to high-school students, select groups of business and community leaders, or conference audiences in the thousands. Whatever the situation, he is known for his accessible and engaging style, coupled with a broad and deep knowledge.

He contributes regularly to many media including the New Scientist, The Guardian, and the BBC – for which he has appeared in ‘The Life Scientific’ and ‘The Infinite Monkey Cage’ among other shows. He is a featured scientist in the Vice/Motherboard feature documentary The Most Unknown, now on Netflix.

Anil’s writings include editing and co-authoring 30 Second Brain (Ivy Press, 2014), consulting for Eye Benders (Ivy Press, 2013; winner of the Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize 2014) and contributing regularly to a variety of media including the New Scientist, The Guardian, and the BBC. He also writes the popular blog NeuroBanter.

Anil Seth Keynote Topics

The neuroscience of consciousness

Anil provides an insight into the state-of-the-art research in the new science of consciousness. Distinguishing between conscious level, conscious content and conscious self, he describes how new experiments are shedding light on the underlying neural mechanisms in normal life as well as in neurological and psychiatric conditions.

Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality

Right now, billions of neurons in your brain are working together to generate a conscious experience -- and not just any conscious experience, your experience of the world around you and of yourself within it. How does this happen? According to neuroscientist Anil Seth, we're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it "reality." Join Seth for a delightfully disorienting talk that may leave you questioning the very nature of your existence.

Being a beast machine

What explains the experience of being a conscious self – of being you? Drawing on cutting-edge cognitive neuroscience and old ideas from psychology and control theory, Anil Seth describes how our conscious selves emerge from a fundamental biological drive to stay alive in an unpredictable world.