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Professor Ole Jensen is part of a global consortium that embraced a novel collaborative approach to investigating one of the brain’s greatest mysteries

Head profile made of different threads of different colors

For centuries, the nature of consciousness has baffled scientists and philosophers alike. What transforms neural activity into the rich, subjective experience of seeing a face, hearing a melody, or feeling the warmth of the sun?

The Cogitate Consortium, a group of researchers from across the globe, including Professor Ole Jensen from Oxford University’s departments of Experimental Psychology and Psychiatry, set out to change that. The consortium brought together the proponents of two influential theories of consciousness—Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT), led by Stanislas Dehaene, and Integrated Information Theory (IIT), proposed by Giulio Tononi—for a rigorous empirical test.

Their adversarial collaboration, a model of scientific inquiry famously advocated for by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman over 20 years ago, represents a fundamental shift in how science can be done. Rather than seeking to confirm pre-existing beliefs, the experiment was designed such that all predictions, methods, and interpretations were registered in advance, eliminating post-hoc rationalisations.

Open, Rigorous, and Fearless
This approach was not for the faint hearted. Science has long rewarded confirmation over contradiction. Adversarial collaborations are risky: they force scientists to get outside their comfort zone and accept that their life’s work might not withstand scrutiny.

And yet, that is precisely what Dehaene and Tononi agreed to do. Under the guidance of a neutral team of investigators, the Cogitate Consortium designed an ambitious study with over 250 participants, using a whole set of cutting-edge neuroimaging techniques: functional MRI (fMRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and intracranial EEG recordings from epilepsy patients. 

 

Read the full story on the Department of Experimental Psychology website.