(Story producer & post supervisor - Vice Media)

The human brain is composed of around 88 billion neurons, with each neuron connecting to about 10,000 other neurons. Consciousness, as psychologist Axel Cleeremans puts it, is one of the most significant problems of the 21st century. “It really remains a mystery how the biological activity of the brain produces minds,” explains Cleermans.

In episode three of The Most Unknown, dark matter physicist Davide D’Angelo travels to Belgium to explore unusual consciousness experiments at Axel Cleeremans’s lab. In the lab, researchers use thought-controlled robotic limbs—similar to the prosthetic limbs used by amputees—as a window into answering the enduring, perhaps unanswerable human question: What is Consciousness?