8 Summary of Week 6

This week, you’ve delved inside your own brain to examine the concept of consciousness. For so long purely the realm of philosophy, scientific study in this fascinating field is now blossoming with technological advances, for example in brain imaging.

Much scientific study currently focuses on what gives rise to individual conscious experiences such as the qualitative experience of seeing the colour red. The ambition is to eventually solve the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ – what processes in the physical brain actually give rise to these subjective experiences?

Along the way you’ve learned about how your brain works, by transmitting messages through immense networks of neurons via electrical pulses and chemical neurotransmitters. Ambitious scientific projects aim to map these brain networks, and to build simulated neurons and neural networks. Could these ‘simulated brains’ ever show aspects of consciousness themselves?

Next week gets really big! You’ll be exploring the concept of infinity, and you’ll see the power of mathematics in action, as it helps us to approach topics that initially seem too vast to be knowable at all. At the other end of the spectrum, the infinitely small will take you into the beautiful world of fractals.

You can now move on to Week 7 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .