Measuring mind-matter interactions using single-trial EEG classification

Is the mind what the brain does? Although for most cognitive neuroscientists studying the neural correlates of consciousness the answer is obvious, the first cracks seem to appear in this rock solid belief. Over the past decades, we have made surprisingly little progress in finding a solution to the Mind-Body Problem: how can changes in matter result in changes in mind? Could it be we are tackling this problem in the wrong way, and that we should look into non-physicalist alternatives? In a recent opinion paper, even Christof Koch embraced the notion on panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is a universal property of the universe, and not something ‘produced’ by matter.Intriguing as these ideas are, how can we empirically verify them? In this talk I will turn to an old thought experiment that may be adapted to an empirical test of non-physicalist models of consciousness, Schrödinger’s Cat. This well-known thought experiment allegedly shows the necessity of a conscious observer to effectuate a so-called collapse of the wave function of a quantum mechanical system. This is significant, because this interpretation gives consciousness a place ‘outside’ physics. We have devised a version of Schrödinger’s Cat experiment which will allow us to study the role of conscious perception in wave function collapse using single-trial decoding of conscious states using EEG. In this talk, I will give a detailed overview the experiment and present some of the first data we collected using this setup