Hakwan Lau, Team Leader, Laboratory for Consciousness, Center for Brain Science, Riken Institute

Hakwan Lau is Team Leader in the Laboratory for Consciousness, Center of Brain Science, Riken Institute near Tokyo. He was born and raised in Hong Kong, where he studied philosophy and cognitive science. Upon graduation, a Rhodes Scholarship enabled him to obtain his doctoral degree from Oxford University. Between 2017-20 he held a position at the University of Hong Kong, his alma mater. He has also been an associate professor at Columbia University in the City of New York, a postdoctoral fellow at the Wellcome Centre of Neuroimaging in London, and, most recently, a fully tenured Professor at UCLA.

"At last, the claim that 'nothing worth reading has been written on consciousness' can be refuted. Hakwan Lau's new book is ESSENTIAL if you want to understand the problem of consciousness. He doesn't try to sell fanciful theories. He presents the experimental data and spells out all the implications. The problem of consciousness may be hard, but this book inspires me to believe that it can be solved. " - Chris Frith, Professor in Neuropsychology at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London, UK

"In this provocative and ingenious book, Hakwan Lau has produced the best higher-order theory of consciousness to date. " - Ned Block, Silver Professor, Departments of Philosophy and Psychology and Center for Neural Science, New York University, USA

"If you are interested in consciousness as a scientific topic, Hakwan Lau's, In Consciousness We Trust, is the book to read. It is a celebration of one of the most interesting topics in brain science by someone who is passionate about it, and is pushing himself, and the rest of the field, to figure this damned thing out. " - Joseph LeDoux, Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science, Center for Neural Science, New York University, USA