Welcome to the first episode of our two-part brain series.

Get ready to give your neurons a little stretch as we dive into some cutting edge and general mind-bending topics in neuroscience.

In this episode, we're tackling one of the biggest questions in neuroscience, philosophy, and even everyday life.

What is consciousness?

To help us explore this, we'll be joined by Dr. Daniel

Toker, who studies how the brain creates that incredible inner experience of being alive and aware.

And here's a fun twist. We've all been taught that humans have exactly five senses,

but what if that's just a myth? And this is just the beginning. In the next episode of our brain series, we're going to look at how scientists are mapping the brain,

whether tiny bits of plastic could be making their way into our gray matter and why the brain itself is an unreliable narrator.

Welcome to Curiosity Weekly. I'm Dr. Samantha Amin.

I'm a neuroscientist. It was my first love.

And you all seem to love it too. So get ready to grow your brain, learning about your brain.

And please don't sue me if your hat size goes up. So let's get started. Let's get start. Wait.

I actually did mess up too much. Okay, we're actually going to learn about the part

of the brain firing when something like that happens. We all make mistakes and the original

Curiosity Queen Miss Frizzle even encourage them. They're learning opportunities after all,

right? I like to live by that wholeheartedly, but, and maybe you relate,

sometimes I think I go a little too far and that learning becomes a slight hyperfixation spiral.

Like when your server says, enjoy your meal and you reflexively say, you too, and then you spend

the whole meal like, why would I say that they're mid-shift?

Well, next time that happens, you can thank one of my

favorite parts of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex or ACC for short. The name may be

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