Consciousness and free will are always going to be tricky to analyse in anything but a human, and it's even tricky to analyse in humans. But there are people who are doing very clever things.
Scientists have recorded neurons in the motor regions of the human brain, and it turns out that there are neurons that fire almost a second before people are aware they want to make a decision. So maybe we can't analyse free will and consciousness in the animal brain per se, but if people find neural signatures of free will or consciousness then we can go into the animal brain and perturb them and see what happens. Then we can start to get at causality.
Where do you see this going, long term?
There are two ways of looking at this. One, in the medium term, is the kind of synthetic neurobiology we work on now, in the sense of taking an intact human brain and fixing it. The other would be building brains from scratch, and that's something we haven't even really thought about. We don't know enough about the brain to build one completely from scratch. But it's good to reevaluate every five or 10 years.
Ed Boyden leads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His group develops software and technologies for controlling neural circuits in order to understand how cognition and emotion arise, and to try and treat intractable brain disorders.
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