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In this wide-ranging dialogue (recorded on September 1, 2017) on the nature of consciousness Dr. Michael Shermer talks with Dr. Gregory Berns, Distinguished Professor of Neuroeconomics and Director of the Center for Neuropolicy and Facility for Education and Research in Neuroscience.

Dr. Berns is famous for his use of fMRI to study canine cognitive function in awake, unrestrained dogs. The goals of his research are to non-invasively map the perceptual and decision systems of the dog\\u2019s brain and to predict likelihood of success in service dogs. He also uses diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to reconstruct the white matter pathways of a wide variety of other mammals, including dolphins, sea lions, coyotes, and the extinct Tasmanian tiger.

Shermer and Berns address the so-called \\u201cHard Problem of Consciousness\\u201d of \\u201cwhat is it like to be a bat (or dog)?\\u201d What is it like to be another sentient being has been impossible to understand until and unless we can get inside the other conscious creature\\u2019s head. Now we can thanks to this new technology. Of course, we cannot have a first-person subjective experience of being a dog\\u2014and in this sense the \\u201cHard Problem of Consciousness\\u201d is something of a conceptual error inasmuch as it can never be answered in this first-person subjective sense, but we can come close to understanding what dogs (and other conscious creatures) are thinking and feeling.