Professor Barry Dainton visits Tononi’s Lab

Posted on: 10 December 2018 in Posts

By Professor Barry Dainton

Over the past decade the neuroscientist Giulio Tononi's "Integrated Information Theory" (IIT) has gradually been gaining ground, and it is now widely accepted as being one of the leading scientific accounts of consciousness.  IIT’s starting point is the observation that our ordinary states of consciousness are profoundly unified – to illustrate, just think of how different your overall consciousness would be if what you are seeing were not experienced together with what you are hearing and thinking.  For Tononi this experiential unity is the key to understanding how consciousness relates to the rest of the world.  According to IIT conscious states are identical with physical systems that are themselves unified in deep and distinctive ways.

I first encountered IIT in 2013-14 when Garrett Mindt, then a Liverpool MA student, decided to focus on it for his dissertation.  Garrett went on start a PhD on IIT at the CEU, and has spent this term completing his thesis at Tononi's lab in Madison, Wisconsin.  Since I’ve written a good deal on the unity of consciousness Tononi decided to invite me over and spend some time at his lab, renew my acquaintance with Garrett, and learn more about developments in IIT. 

Having long found IIT intriguing but well aware that my understanding of important aspects of the theory was quite rudimentary, I was happy to accept the invitation.  So at the end of October I travelled to Wisconsin and spent a week visiting Tononi’s lab.  The trip was exhausting, but proved enjoyable and worthwhile.  It was good to meet up with Garrett again, and everyone made me feel very welcome. Tononi was incredibly generous with his time, and was willing to spend hours explaining the core concept of IIT, their recent successes in model spatial experience, and some likely future extensions of the theory.  I learnt a huge amount, and it was impossible not to be impressed by what they had achieved, and hoped to achieve.