Antti Revonsuo

Antti Revonsuo is professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Skövde, Sweden, and professor of psychology at the University of Turku, Finland. He has been conducting research on consciousness and the philosophical mind-brain problem since the early 1990s. Revonsuo’s research has focused especially on dreaming and consciousness and on the neural correlates of visual consciousness. He has written three books on consciousness: Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon (2006), Consciousness: The Science of Subjectivity (2010) and Foundations of Consciousness (2018). In these books, he lays out his overall view of the fundamental nature of consciousness and how philosophy and science would best be able to approach it. Revonsuo is also known for his evolutionary-psychological theory of the function of dreaming, the Threat-Simulation Theory (published in Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 2000). Revonsuo and his research group have recently started to work on some new lines of research, focusing on the neural mechanisms of consciousness as revealed by general anaesthesia and on new theories of the function of dreaming (especially the Social Simulation Theory) that treat dreaming as a virtual reality simulation of the waking world.