British · b. 1972
Anil Seth studies how brains build experience. At the University of Sussex, where he co-directs the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, he treats perception as a controlled hallucination: the brain guesses what is out there and corrects those guesses against the signals arriving from the senses. He read natural sciences at King's College, Cambridge, took a PhD in computer science at Sussex, and spent years building mathematical measures of how far brain activity is integrated enough to count as conscious — work that made him one of the most cited researchers in neuroscience and cognitive science. He edits the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness, writes for the Guardian, New Scientist and the BBC, and argued in a TED talk watched by millions that the self is a perception too, assembled the same way as the colour red. Being You (2021), his first book for general readers, became a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize. He is related to the novelist Vikram Seth.