University of New England (UNE) staff are invited to participate in a unique and ambitious research initiative: the Highway to Consciousness (HtC) project.
Recently granted Ethics approval to open participation to all members of the UNE community, this study now invites any UNE student, professor, or staff member (over the age of 18) to take part. The research team, led by Dr. Daiva Newby, Dr. Graham Jamieson, and Matthew Fernance, needs around 300 participants to provide essential pilot data that will inform the first major review of the project’s assessment tool.
This is an exciting opportunity for UNE staff and students to contribute to ground-breaking research in the study of consciousness, a concept that remains one of science’s most challenging mysteries.
The Highway to Consciousness project aims to explore consciousness through an introspective, experiential lens rather than the biological markers that dominate modern neuroscience. Daiva, originally from Europe, describes an early fascination with the mysteries of science, sparked by growing up in a small rural town an hour from the Baltic Sea, where the local library was a sanctuary for adventure and discovery.
"The town library was one of my favourite places in the world," Daiva recalls. "I enjoyed reading about adventures exploring the unknown, like Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. Scientists, real and fictional, became my heroes." Now, with the Highway to Consciousness project, Daiva feels as though the team is “also traveling into the unknown—the human psyche, which is layered in complex combinations of unconscious, automatic, emotional, reflexive elements with conscious, irregular, symbolic, and meaning-making aspects.”
Daiva in Europe.
Inspired by Chris Rea’s The Road to Hell, the project is, in Daiva’s words, “an exploration of consciousness from an introspective angle,” aiming to reclaim “the value of one of the most fundamental features of consciousness—awareness.” Consciousness itself remains, as Daiva explains, “hidden in plain sight—there is no formal, agreed definition of it, and no interdisciplinary operationalisation or a way to measure it.” With a focus on measuring the subjective experience of consciousness—its awareness of time, emotions, and self—the HtC team intends to build a tool that will elevate these aspects in a field that often emphasises biological measures like EEGs and MRIs.
The research team is particularly interested in developing a psychometric tool to measure different dimensions of consciousness, potentially producing a consciousness profile that may vary with factors like age, background, and health.
In the future, this tool could have significant clinical implications, especially for individuals with brain injuries or disorders of consciousness. Daiva explains, "Brain injury from motor vehicle accidents or haemorrhages can result in disorders of consciousness, like minimally conscious states or coma, and an ability to measure consciousness can assist in prognosis, treatment planning, or even end-of-life decisions. We also believe it could be useful in cases of epilepsy, dementia, and other conditions that impact consciousness."
If successful, this tool would help the team answer complex theoretical questions about consciousness, but the team is realistic about the challenges.
“The project has been extremely challenging conceptually and technically, as we are exploring new ground,” Daiva notes. “There is no path for us to follow, and we have to forge the path as we thrash out ideas and try to translate theoretical and conceptual ideas into pragmatic and accessible content and tasks.”
While this process has been demanding, Daiva emphasizes that “critical and objective feedback about the questionnaire is vital to help us shape the final version.”
Leo supervising the project.
Looking ahead, the HtC team envisions broad applications for their research, from expanding into international collaborations to exploring fields like neurology, emergency medicine, developmental and clinical neuroscience, linguistics, and even anthropology. Daiva explains, “Consciousness remains a tough and stubborn scientific riddle, and empirical science must continue to evolve its methods and tackle it from novel angles.” The ultimate aim is to move closer to a unifying theory of consciousness.
Participation in the Highway to Consciousness project is a unique chance for UNE staff to contribute to ground-breaking research with far-reaching theoretical and clinical implications. UNE staff members interested in joining or learning more are encouraged to reach out to the research team.
This project marks a chance to help navigate new frontiers in the study of consciousness and, potentially, help in developing tools that could shape the future of clinical neuroscience. As Daiva notes, “The beauty of science is that new information leads to revisions, and sometimes cherished ideas have to die off to make room for something better.”
Participants can now either login using:
- Username: une
- Password: une
OR.
- Click the ‘Sign-in as guest’ link on the login page (in lieu of typing any username and password).
Please contact Daiva Newby dnewby2@une.edu.au if you have any questions.
