Dr. Seth was born in Oxford, England in 1972. Currently, he is a member of the permanent faculty of the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, UK, where his research focuses on neuroscience and consciousness. After a first degree at King's College, Cambridge and a doctorate in artificial intelligence and computer science, he moved to The Neurosciences Institute, San Diego, where he was a Postdoctoral Fellow and then an Associate Fellow in theoretical neurobiology, working closely with Dr. Gerald Edelman.

Seth's early work focused on cognitive science, theoretical biology, and artificial life. By integrating these areas, he developed new explanations of certain kinds of irrational behavior. At the Neurosciences Institute, he worked on a number of ¡®brain-based devices' (BBDs): robotic platforms controlled by simulated nervous systems. These BBDs showed how neural mechanisms could underlie visual object recognition, texture discrimination, and episodic memory. Inspired by the need to analyze complex neural mechanisms such as those within BBDs, he developed a new framework, based on methods from quantitative economics, which is able to uncover causal interactions in complex networks. This framework has a rich potential, within and beyond neuroscience.

The primary goal of Seth's research is to construct a neural theory of conscious experience. He has published widely on the theoretical neuroscience of consciousness, models of consciousness, measuring consciousness, animal consciousness, and the functions of consciousness. He is editor of the Consciousness section of Scholarpedia and is currently establishing a Centre for Consciousness Science at Sussex University. His guiding principle is to search for neural processes that not only correlate with, but also account for features of conscious experience.