Photo credit: WWU Behavioral Neuroscience Program.
In late February 2025, I had the chance to meet Christof Koch at a student and faculty reception just before his keynote at Western. After a short talk and a Q&A session with a cohort of graduating behavioral neuroscience majors and, later, the broader audience, I joined the group of students gathering around him to ask more focused questions.
I asked him about his views on emergence in neural functioning and how it relates to consciousness. He responded with a careful, "Well, what do you mean by emergence?" I gave an answer that gestured toward ideas like Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, which explains conscious access via functional integration across distributed networks, and how functional localization contributes to constructing subjective experience... but it didn't land cleanly (my question was unprepared). He was generous in narrowing the concept, and we ultimately discussed the relationship between information integration and the emergence of conscious states.
Nearby stood the person who had first introduced me to the BNS program at Western. She had raised her hand early during the Q&A but hadn’t gotten a chance to speak. I turned to her and said, “Hey, you're a smart person who knows things. You had a question earlier during the Q&A.”
She asked about how degrees of consciousness, such as those described or captured by Koch's consciousness meter, might relate to neurodiversity, specifically autism. Koch paused, then offered that differences in information input and processing could meaningfully shape conscious experience, though he admitted he hadn't thought much about it before. With great charm, he picked up a brain-shaped pencil eraser, held it in the air, and said with a grin, "There are a lot of brains in here!"
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