Once upon a time…

by Lucia Melloni

The beginnings in Seattle (March 2018)

It all started in March 2018, at the Allen Institute for Brain Sciences, Seattle (US) with a workshop on consciousness organised by Christof Koch with the generous support of the Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF). Dawid Potgieter, the Program Officer of TWCF, was playing with the idea of launching an initiative around adversarial collaborations as a mean to accelerate research on consciousness.

We had 2 days of heated discussions over potentials experiments that would arbitrate among, back then, three theories: Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory and Higher Order Theory. And a wonderful dinner at the rooftop casino of the Allen Institute, where the picture (right) was taken.

The Nascent Ideas Evolved

After the two day intense meeting in Seattle Liad, Mike and I were tasked with the development of the experimental paradigms, predictions and outcomes.

The initial ideas molded over the course of the next 9 months. After several discussions with the group, and meetings among the three of us, we converged on an experimental design. In that process we were down from three theories to two. The final contenders were Global Neuronal Workspace and Integrated Information Theory, with the adversarial collaborators being Stanislas Dehaene and Giulio Tononi, respectively.

Expert labs from around the world joined us in conducting the experiments and thus the team grew. Ole Jensen and Huan Luo joined to carry out the M-EEG parts of the projects. Floris de Lange and Hal Blumenfeld would carry out the fMRI portion of the studies, and Gabriel Kreiman and Lucia Melloni/Sasha Devore would conduct the ECoG portion.

For the data management we reached out to Daniel Marcus @ Radiologics.

In January 2019 we finalized the studies, project plan and governance which was filled as a preregistration in OSF

Meet the team as 2019 (@SfN 2019)