Greg Gage
Neuroscientist & TED Senior Fellow
Backyard Brains
Biography
Greg Gage is the co-founder and CEO of Backyard Brains. He is a neuroscientist, author and biomedical engineer who loves tinkering with all things electric. Currently, Greg is developing new tools, curricula, and experiments that allow the general public to participate, hands-on, in neuroscience discovery. He is a senior fellow at TED and has given 10 TED talks. He's an award-winning investigator at the National Institute of Health, and he was recognized in a White House ceremony for his commitment to citizen science. He is currently working with MIT Press on a follow-up to his 2022 'How the Brain Works' about how the mind perceives consciousness and how we perceive ourselves... all explained with hands-on experiments.
About the talk
In a post-AI world, understanding what makes human consciousness unique is more urgent than ever. Neuroscientist Greg Gage takes the audience inside the brain's own 'cognitive code', drawing on a series of recent experiments performed with students and members that aim to explore how the brain builds models of our body and consciousness. From illusions that reshape our sense of self to surprising data showing how simple images of eyes can alter real behavior, these studies reveal that consciousness is not magic, but an evolved code for predicting others - and, by extension, ourselves. By sharing these results and the perspective shift they sparked in my own work, I will argue that to understand human evolution (and our place alongside AI), we need to understand consciousness as a model, not as magic.