Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Srivas Chennu who is based on the Medway campus of the University of Kent where he works in the School of Computing. Srivas does cross-disciplinary work on consciousness, and in this really insightful interview he talks about how we are today able to ask questions that the ancient Greeks could not. We discuss how his research intersects with my own work in near-death experiences and he talks about how his collaborators are studying what happens in the brain when someone has an NDE. We also discuss how films are often better at conveying these techniques than academic papers. Srivas reflects on how a decade ago to study consciousness would have been laughed at as it was deemed to be so amorphous, and how and why that has now changed. Originally from South India and born in Madras, Srivas talks about his scholastic education and how his earliest memories were very colourful and multifarious. He talks about his religious memories – his grandfather was a Hindu priest and religion was w