Live Lecture in Oslo: Lucia Melloni

Date: October 2026 (Tentative date: 14 October) Location: Oslo

Join us for a live lecture by Lucia Melloni (Ruhr-University-Bochum, Germany and NYU Grossman School of Medicine, New York).

Title: Testing Theories, Expanding Minds: Lessons Learned and Challenges Ahead

Further details regarding the exact time and venue in Oslo will be provided soon.

Lucia Melloni
Predictive Brain Department, University Alliance Ruhr, Faculty of Psychology, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany
Department of Neurology, NYU Grossman School of Medicine, New York, USA
Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Brain, Mind, and Consciousness Program, Toronto, ON, Canada

Abstract:
Consciousness remains one of the deepest mysteries in science. We still lack answers to fundamental questions: how and why we feel the way we feel; why we experience the world in the rich, structured manner we do; and why millions of patients lose and regain consciousness every day, while countless others never recover it. At the same time, urgent debates about AI consciousness, the risk of ascribing experience where there is none, and the moral cost of overlooking the experiences of animals or other nonverbal beings make the scientific study of consciousness more pressing than ever.
In this talk, I will introduce two ongoing lines of work that aim to reshape how the field advances: (i) open-science adversarial collaborations designed to test competing theories of consciousness and accelerate scientific convergence, and (ii) emerging efforts to build a science of consciousness that is not anchored exclusively in adult neurotypical minds but instead embraces the diversity of minds found across development, species, and even artificial systems. Such an approach requires us to acknowledge from the outset that consciousness may manifest in ways unfamiliar to us, and that beings who cannot speak, fetuses, infants, nonhuman animals, AI systems, and perhaps even engineered biological collectives, may (or may not) nevertheless instantiate forms of experience worth understanding.

Together, these efforts aim to move the field toward a more rigorous, collaborative, and inclusive framework, one in which theories are openly tested, assumptions are examined rather than inherited, and the full spectrum of possible conscious minds is taken seriously.