Editorial

Abstract

‘It is remarkable that most of the work in both cognitive science and the neurosciences makes no reference to consciousness (or “awareness”).’ So wrote Francis Crick and Christof Koch, a quarter of a century ago, in a paper which with hindsight marked the rebirth of consciousness science as a serious enterprise (Crick and Koch, 1990). Times have changed and consciousness science has since flourished. It is now a rich multi-disciplinary enterprise engaging neuroscientists, psychologists, philosophers, computer scientists, clinicians and physicists, collaborating in the systematic investigation of the biological and physical mechanisms underlying conscious experience. Consciousness is studied in psychiatric and neurological patients, in non-human animals and in healthy human subjects, with experiments deploying increasingly powerful methodologies for acquiring, analysing and connecting first-person behavioural, neurophysiological and genetic data. The launch of Neuroscience of Consciousness reflects the maturity of this rigorous and empirically grounded approach to the science of subjective experience. As its Editors we share the conviction that natural science has much to say about consciousness, and we look forward to this story unfolding within this new J ournal .\r\rPeople have been wondering about consciousness since they have wondered about anything. Hippocrates long ago identified the brain as the primary organ of experience (though Aristotle did not). Much later, Descartes codified what we now recognize as the ‘hard problem’ of relating matter and consciousness (Chalmers, 1996). At the birth of scientific psychology, midwived by William James and Wilhelm Wundt at the close of the 19th century, consciousness was the central explanatory target (James, 1892). But through the 20th century the influence of behaviourism shifted the goal of psychology to the prediction and control of behaviour, with the study of consciousness pushed to the sidelines. The suppression of consciousness continued even through the rise of cognitive science from the 1960s, albeit … \r\rEmail: a.k.seth{at}sussex.ac.uk