How to Know Your Mind: Exploring the Science of Consciousness
Right now something is having your experience. There is a colour to the room, a texture to your mood, a feeling of being here reading this. It is the most obvious fact in your life and the one science has the least idea what to do with. We can map which neurons fire when you see red. We still cannot say why any of that firing feels like anything at all.
This is the hard problem, and it has resisted everyone who has come at it. Neuroscience approaches from the outside, measuring brains. Philosophy and the contemplative traditions approach from the inside, examining experience directly. The two camps have spent decades talking past each other, each convinced the other is looking at the wrong thing. Óscar's argument is that neither view works alone. You need both, and the interesting work is happening where they meet.
In this Growth Lab LIVE session, he looks at what the current science of consciousness actually claims, where its limits sit, and why meditation, altered states and psychedelics have become serious research tools rather than fringe curiosities. These are ways of interrogating the sense of self from the inside while measuring it from the outside, which turns out to be one of the few routes to progress on a question humans have been asking for thousands of years.
What you'll learn
What the hard problem of consciousness is, and why brain imaging alone has not cracked it
How first-person experience and third-person measurement can be combined rather than treated as rivals
What meditation and altered states reveal about the sense of self, and how researchers study something so subjective
Why psychedelics have become a legitimate laboratory for consciousness research, and what the findings suggest so far
What all of this means for how much you can actually trust your own introspection
About the speaker
Óscar Soto Angona is a psychiatrist and researcher at Parc Sanitari Sant Joan de Déu and the Sant Joan de Déu Research Institute, where he works with the ANIMA group on new interventions for the mind. He trained in psychiatry at Vall d'Hebron and spent several years in its Treatment Resistant Depression programme under a Río Hortega fellowship. His research focuses on the phenomenology of altered states of consciousness induced by psychedelics and their therapeutic potential, and he has worked as investigator or therapist on clinical trials involving psilocybin, MDMA, esketamine and 5-MeO-DMT. He is founding president of the Spanish Society of Psychedelic Medicine (SEMPSi).
Agenda:
1845h - Doors open
1900h - Talk starts
1945h - Q&A
2015h - Drinks & Networking
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