How should we decide who, or what, is conscious?

Short Wave

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🗓️ 13 July 2026

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

In the age of AI, what differentiates humans from robots? What makes humans … human? To find answers, many people are studying consciousness: our capacity for experience. But doctors and researchers still have a long way to go when it comes to finding new ways to detect consciousness in humans — much less computer software. That gets especially tricky when people are unable to use their words or bodies to tell others whether or not they’re conscious, like in vegetative states. Today on Short Wave, how some researchers are finding ways to get around those limitations.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:05.6	Hey, Shortwaivers, Regina Barbara here with our next installment of Shortwave's summer series, TechCamp.
0:12.2	Every Monday, check this feed for a new episode about the technological frontier, tracking down the breakthroughs, experiments, and innovations that could change everything.
0:22.4	And today, producer Rachel Carlson is here to talk about consciousness.
0:26.8	Hey, Rachel.
0:27.5	Hi, Gina.
0:28.4	So a lot of people have been thinking about this, especially in the context of AI.
0:34.0	Like, is that AI model sentient? Do they have their own experience of the world? But it's a really
0:41.7	tricky question to answer just for humans. So that's where we're going to start with a neuroscientist
0:48.6	named Adrian Owen. He's a professor at the University of Western Ontario, and he's also the
0:53.8	chief scientific officer
0:55.1	at Creos, which sells a system to assess brain health. Back in the early 2000s, Adrian met a woman
1:02.6	who'd been hit by two cars and suffered severe brain injury as a result. She was in what doctors
1:09.1	call a vegetative state. And right now, the big test doctors
1:13.5	use if someone's in this kind of state to see if they're conscious or not involves asking them
1:19.5	to look at objects or respond to sounds or move their hands. But this woman couldn't do those things.
1:26.6	Her eyes were open, but she couldn't respond to doctors to tell them if she was aware of what was happening or in pain.
1:33.4	Wow. Okay. So was she conscious? No one was sure. But Adrian wasn't content just not knowing. So he decided to see if he could find out if she was aware of anything
1:45.8	going on around her. To do that, he put her in a brain scanner and asked her to imagine
1:51.9	playing a game of tennis. So if you or I do this exercise, Gina, it probably sounds something
2:00.1	similar to what Adrian thinks about.
2:02.4	I'm on my own, I'm, say, at Wimbledon.
	...

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