Catz Professor publishes a Landmark Experiment in Psychiatry and Psychology

Professor Ole Jensen, Chair of Translational Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford Department of Experimental Psychology and Non-Stipendiary Professorial Fellow at Catz, recently formed part of a global consortium that embraced a novel, collaborative approach to investigating one of the brain’s greatest mysteries.

For centuries, the nature of consciousness has baffled scientists and philosophers alike. What transforms neural activity into the rich, subjective experience of seeing a face, hearing a melody, or feeling the warmth of the sun? The Cogitate Consortium, a group of researchers from across the globe, including Professor Ole Jensen from Oxford University’s departments of Experimental Psychology and Psychiatry, set out to change that. The consortium brought together the proponents of two influential theories of consciousness—Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT), led by Stanislas Dehaene, and Integrated Information Theory (IIT), proposed by Giulio Tononi—for a rigorous empirical test.

Their adversarial collaboration, a model of scientific inquiry famously advocated for by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman over 20 years ago, represents a fundamental shift in how science can be done. Rather than seeking to confirm pre-existing beliefs, the experiment was designed such that all predictions, methods, and interpretations were registered in advance, eliminating post-hoc rationalisations.

The neuroimaging research crucially incorporated MEG recordings, a technique capable of capturing neuronal activity throughout the entire brain. The MEG recordings were conducted by Professor Ole Jensen at the University of Oxford in collaboration with Huan Luo at Peking University.

Ole Jensen commented: “This adversarial collaboration has not only provided crucial understanding of how consciousness emerges in the brain but has also revealed a novel and powerful methodology for conducting science, one that we will undoubtedly incorporate into our future MEG investigations on cognitive and clinical neuroscience. The consortium’s work also clearly demonstrates the achievements possible through international collaboration, bringing together the foremost experts worldwide.”

For full information, please see the Department website.