Understanding the Mechanisms of
Consciousness through Narrative

My name is Satoshi Nishida, and I am the representative of this research area, "Narrative Consciousness Studies: Pioneering a New Framework for Consciousness." We are supported by the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas (B) from FY2024 to FY2026.

In our daily lives, each of us experiences a rich variety of consciousness. Although consciousness is a familiar phenomenon to us, its underlying mechanisms are poorly understood scientifically. This is largely because scientific consciousness research has typically oversimplified rich conscious experiences.

To study rich conscious experiences as they are, our research area focuses on the linguistic narratives of these experiences. We will engage in interdisciplinary research to extract detailed and reliable narratives of conscious experiences, evaluate them quantitatively, and identify their correlates with measured brain signals. We believe that this approach should advance our understanding of the neural mechanisms shaping our rich conscious experiences.