Crowdscience

It's pretty obvious to each of us that we are conscious, as we go about our days and feel the experience of just ‘being ourselves'. But how do we know that someone else is conscious? It’s something we lose during dreamless sleep, under anaesthesia or in a coma. But what exactly is consciousness? On the one hand, it’s pretty obvious - it’s what we all feel as we go about our daily lives. It's the experience of 'being you'. On the other hand, it gets pretty tricky when we try to pin down the science of it all. How do we know that someone (or something) else is conscious? CrowdScience listener Sylvester was wondering about this and he got in touch with a few questions on the subject. What is the relationship between our consciousness and reality? Is it all just a hallucination? When does it start and stop? Does consciousness reside in a particular part of the brain? Host Marnie Chesterton sets out to tackle this elusive but utterly fundamental quality of life and sees how researchers are attempting to co