Why understand consciousness?

Think about your school lessons. When were you taught how consciousness works? You weren't because nobody had come up with a clear account of it! Perhaps if you studied neuroscience or philosophy at university level you learnt about what different people thought about it, including right back to the ancient Greeks...lots (and lots) of words, but still no definitive, concise description that made sense.

Isn't this astonishing? The very mechanism that lets you know of your own existence, of the world and of your interaction with it is not understood.

In most areas of science there is now a fantastic level of understanding of what is going on. Once the mysteries of evolution, genetics and DNA were cracked, the mechanisms underpinning living organisms became clear.

Now if you want to find out something really new you have to go the very large - black holes, dark matter, the big bang - or the very small - fundamental particles - and use the most obscure equations of theoretical physics, or enormous and expensive particle accelerators.

Yet consciousness is present most of the time between our own ears, we have privileged internal access to it and neuroscientists are offering new clues every day to how it works (and even publishing their findings 'open access'). The time is right for a model of the mechanisms of consciousness.

There are three practical benefits of such a model:

1. To help to structure and interpret experimental data about the conscious brain. 2. To understand and improve conscious thinking in ourselves and others. 3. To create artificially conscious entities.

However they are as nothing compared with the opportunity to properly understand, for the first time, how consciousness works, so we can all better understand what we really are.

By the way, the photo is of a wonderful illuminated glass artwork in a gallery in Hay on Wye.