How do your billions of tiny brain cells with their electrical spikes build consciousness?

And why is your laptop with its billions of parts and tiny electrical signals presumably not conscious?

Could other large systems like a city be conscious? And what does any of this

have to do with ant hills or blue birds or your memory of your first kiss?

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University,

and I've spent my whole career studying the intersection between how the brain works

and how we experience life.

And there's hardly a better example of this intersection than consciousness,

your feeling of being aware of your surroundings and your own existence, your ability to experience and feel things. This somehow emerges from the

activity of our brains, and it is our experience of life. So today, we're going to dive deep into a big

question, possibly the central question of neurobiology. What is consciousness? We'll talk about

how we can define it, why it's a challenge for our science to capture it, and whether other

things could be conscious. So think back to your first kiss. The memory of it pops back into

your head in an instant. But where was that image before you became conscious of it? that feeling the name of the person, how is it

represented in your brain before and after? I ask you to think about it. What's the difference between

those two states? In other words, what events in the brain constitute awareness or consciousness.

I made an earlier episode about all the things going on in your head unconsciously,

without any access or awareness on your part.

And the upshot there was that at any moment,

there's an enormous amount of activity going on in your brain.

A hundred billion cells having little electrical spikes, tens or hundreds of times per second.

And you are not consciously aware of almost any of that activity in your brain.

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