Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 hours ago
Ehud Ahissar on consciousness and convergence of analog brains with digital thoughts.
Show notes: braininspired.co/podcast/237
Patreon (full episodes, archive, Discord, more): patreon.com/braininspired
Apple podcasts: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/brain-inspired/id1428880766?mt=2
Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/2UZj8c8Ap5oc2gh2rJxLLe
Music by @dunovank
The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.
Read more about our partnership: thetransmitter.org/partners
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To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org.
Ehud Ahissar runs the Ahissar Lab at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, where he studies the neuronal and behavioral mechanisms of perception. Ehud sees perception as a closed-loop process, in which organisms actively generate the sensory signals they interpret. Today, we discuss his development of an idea about how this kind of processing can account for our conscious experience. It's a type of dualism Ehud calls "perceptual dualism," different than the dualisms you may already know. I'll use his own words to summarize it here…
"The idea is that humans inevitably experience the world through two fundamentally different modes: digital brain–brain (BB) communication and analog brain–world (BW) interaction. In this view, the mind, and consciousness, emerge as social-like phenomena (in the philosophical sense), grounded in BB communication while constrained by BW interaction."
Take note of the term brain-brain, shortened as BB, and the term brain-world, shortened as BW, because throughout our discussion you'll often hear just BB and BW to refer to those two distinct domains.
So we discuss the ins and outs of his ideas, how came to them via studying active sensing in rodent whisker neurophysiology, how the brain implements this dualism via nested loops of neural circuitry that oppose and interlace with each other at multiple levels, and the idea that attractors, in the dynamical systems sense of attractor, may be the corresponding brain signatures of the digital phenomena that belong to the brain-brain mode of cognition.
0:00 - Intro
5:09 - A new kind of dualism
7:19 - Ehud's whiskers background
14:10 - Digital-analog perceptual dualism
26:08 - Digital communication between humans
32:26 - Attractors as the digital-analog interface
39:50 - Consciousness
50:11 - Dynamics and perceptual bottleneck
51:47 - Language, AI, and digital symbols
1:00:54 - Computation and brains (digital and analog)
1:06:43 - Improving AI with event based activation
1:11:10 - Dualism
1:17:26 - The hard problem of consciousness
1:21:26 - BB and BW interaction
1:24:55 - Tension between BB and BW
1:34:28 - Looking forward
1:37:37 - Srange loops
Ehud Ahissar on consciousness and convergence of analog brains with digital thoughts.
Show notes: braininspired.co/podcast/237
Patreon (full episodes, archive, Discord, more): patreon.com/braininspired
Apple podcasts: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/brain-inspired/id1428880766?mt=2
Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/2UZj8c8Ap5oc2gh2rJxLLe
Music by @dunovank
The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.
Read more about our partnership: thetransmitter.org/partners
Sign up for the “Brain Inspired” email alerts to be notified every time a new “Brain Inspired” episode is released: thetransmitter.org/newsletters
To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org.
Ehud Ahissar runs the Ahissar Lab at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, where he studies the neuronal and behavioral mechanisms of perception. Ehud sees perception as a closed-loop process, in which organisms actively generate the sensory signals they interpret. Today, we discuss his development of an idea about how this kind of processing can account for our conscious experience. It's a type of dualism Ehud calls "perceptual dualism," different than the dualisms you may already know. I'll use his own words to summarize it here…
"The idea is that humans inevitably experience the world through two fundamentally different modes: digital brain–brain (BB) communication and analog brain–world (BW) interaction. In this view, the mind, and consciousness, emerge as social-like phenomena (in the philosophical sense), grounded in BB communication while constrained by BW interaction."
Take note of the term brain-brain, shortened as BB, and the term brain-world, shortened as BW, because throughout our discussion you'll often hear just BB and BW to refer to those two distinct domains.
So we discuss the ins and outs of his ideas, how came to them via studying active sensing in rodent whisker neurophysiology, how the brain implements this dualism via nested loops of neural circuitry that oppose and interlace with each other at multiple levels, and the idea that attractors, in the dynamical systems sense of attractor, may be the corresponding brain signatures of the digital phenomena that belong to the brain-brain mode of cognition.
0:00 - Intro
5:09 - A new kind of dualism
7:19 - Ehud's whiskers background
14:10 - Digital-analog perceptual dualism
26:08 - Digital communication between humans
32:26 - Attractors as the digital-analog interface
39:50 - Consciousness
50:11 - Dynamics and perceptual bottleneck
51:47 - Language, AI, and digital symbols
1:00:54 - Computation and brains (digital and analog)
1:06:43 - Improving AI with event based activation
1:11:10 - Dualism
1:17:26 - The hard problem of consciousness
1:21:26 - BB and BW interaction
1:24:55 - Tension between BB and BW
1:34:28 - Looking forward
1:37:37 - Srange loops
