Michael Graziano

Michael Graziano is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Princeton University. He is also a writer, composer, and occasional ventriloquist. He is the author of many books (both novels and neuroscience books), and has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets. His research at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute has spanned topics from movement control to how the brain processes the space around the body. His current work focuses on the brain basis of consciousness. He has proposed the Attention Schema Theory of consciousness, a mechanistic, artificially buildable framework for explaining how brain-based agents believe and insist they contain consciousness inside them, and how that self model is useful for effective cognitive and social function.