The Tiny Blue Dot Foundation is a 501(c)(3) currently funding and managing investigations of consciousness.

Our mission statement is to develop a collaborative effort to understand the nature of consciousness and its place in nature by developing and validating theoretically-motivated and clinically useful measures of consciousness.

Our strategy is to formulate and derive a principled, quantitative, comprehensive, and empirically testable account of what consciousness is; to understand mechanistically how consciousness is generated, altered, and lost in humans and animals; how it can be measured reliably in neurologically impaired patients, and whether and how it can be present in machines; and, finally, to explore the ethical, legal, philosophical and other societal implications of this knowledge.

Specifically, our aims include:

Aim I: Develop a practical system with which to measure the presence and the quantity of consciousness

Aim II: Establish which brain regions constitute the physical substrate of consciousness in the brain

Aim III: Estimate states of consciousness from the ‘connectome’ of the human brain, and infer consciousness in animals, computers and groups of people, animals and computers

Aim IV: Grow a community of scholars, scientists and clinicians debating, testing and evaluating these ideas

We are currently working with a team of researchers from:

    The Allen Institute
    University of Wisconsin-Madison
    Massachusetts General Hospital
    University of California-Los Angeles
    Medical University of South Carolina
    University of Milan

Tiny Blue Dot Foundation

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