The Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science was founded in 2010 with a generous donation from the Dr. Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation (with additional support from UK research councils), the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science (SCCS) represents a new and multidisciplinary approach to clinical intervention and diagnosis, based on the science of the complex brain networks that give rise to consciousness. With its unique combination of expertise and facilities, the SCCS has the potential to become a dominant influence and an international touchstone for the highest quality research in consciousness science.

The Centre Unravelling the mind, brain and consciousness is one of six inter-disciplinary research themes that the University of Sussex is addressing as part of its strategic plan for 2008-2015. A key part of this effort, the SCCS is a new dedicated research facility conducting fundamentally new research into consciousness science. Truly interdisciplinary in nature, it brings together consciousness researchers from Psychology, Psychiatry, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience, and Cognitive Science to address common questions using converging methodologies. Establishment of the new Centre represents a most significant contribution to the strategic direction of the University, providing a model for future activity and exemplar of current and future research. Sussex is uniquely placed for such a centre of international standing, building on its distinguished reputation for multidisciplinary work in cognitive science, neuroscience and experimental psychology. The SCCS also synergises with new developments, most obviously the Brighton and Sussex Medical School with its newly opened Clinical Imaging Sciences Centre which adds cutting-edge clinical and neuroimaging expertise. Other relevant centres include the established Sussex Centre for Neuroscience and the internationally leading Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics. With this available expertise on one site, we have the ability to deliver novel and powerful insights into high level brain functions that include human consciousness.

Our research follows two interacting strands; one in basic science, and the other in clinical application ultimately focused on developing new innovative treatments. Advances in basic science have the potential to translate into new clinical approaches, and clinical studies can shape the development of novel testable theories and computational models of basic brain mechanisms underlying consciousness.

The basic science strand seeks to unravel the complex brain mechanisms that generate consciousness. Most current approaches focus on identifying so-called ‘neural correlates of consciousness’, for example, how brain activity changes when a stimulus is experienced or not. Our research will move beyond correlation to develop new theories and models of neural mechanisms that actually account for fundamental properties of consciousness; for example the property that conscious experiences provide integrated representations of very large amounts of information. New theory can guide and be guided by large-scale computational modelling of the corresponding brain mechanisms; synthetic computational modelling is needed because standard reductionist approaches struggle when confronted by the complex networks of the brain. Theoretical, modelling, and experimental approaches mutually inform and constrain one another, and will interact with data and insights from the clinical strand.

The clinical application strand translates insights about the mechanisms of consciousness to the clinical domain, while simultaneously feeding-back experimental data to stimulate developments in the basic science. Work in this strand focuses on neuropsychiatry as well as on brain-injured patients with neurological deficits. In addition to its evident clinical importance, psychiatric neuroscience has considerable potential for informing scientific approaches to consciousness. The disturbances of conscious mental life that occur in psychiatric disorders involve radical and disabling shifts in the contents and quality of conscious experience, for example profound changes in emotional state or specific experiential phenomena such as auditory hallucinations. Characterizing the neural processes involved in these disorders help us to understand their operation in healthy individuals, lighting the way to novel clinical interventions. Similarly, analysis of brain injured patients provides unique access to informative dissociations of conscious experience; for example, ‘vegetative state’ patients show high levels of arousal apparently without any accompanying awareness.

The SCCS is directed by Dr. Anil Seth (Reader, Informatics; neuroscience) and Prof. Hugo Critchley (Professor, Brighton and Sussex Medical School; neuropsychiatry) who guide the basic science strand and clinical application strand respectively. Other key SCCS faculty include Prof. Zoltán Dienes (Psychology; hypnosis, implicit learning), Dr. Nick Medford (Psychiatry; depersonalization disorder), Dr. Jamie Ward (Psychology; synaesthesia), Prof. Owen Holland (Informatics; machine consciousness), and Dr. Ron Chrisley (Cognitive Science, synthetic phenomenology). Recently appointed SCCS research fellows include Dr. Daniel Bor (cognitive neuroscience) and Dr. Eugenia Radulescu (neuropsychiatry). Facilities available within the centre include fMRI and EEG neuroimaging, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), neuroimaging-compatible autonomic metering, high-performance computation, anthropomimetic robotics, sensory substitution devices, and more.