Transcript

I love a great mystery. And I'm fascinated by the greatest unsolved mystery in science, perhaps because it's personal. It's about who we are. And I can't help but be curious. The mystery is this. What is the relationship between your brain and your conscious experiences, such as your experience of the taste of chocolate, or the feeling of velvet?

Now, this mystery is not new. In 1868, Thomas Huxley wrote, how it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness, comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the genie when Aladdin rubbed his lamp. Now Huxley knew that brain activity and conscious experiences are correlated, but you didn't know why. To the science of his day, it was a mystery.