Colloquium
Time: 11:00am, Mar 24, 2026
Venue: Lecture Hall, Shanghai Brain Center
Speaker: Prof. Steven Laureys
Professor, GIGA Consciousness, University of Liège, Belgium
Hangzhou International Brain Center and Zhejiang–Belgium Joint Laboratory for Disorders of Consciousness, Hangzhou Normal University, China
Host：Dr. Henry Evrard
Biography:
Neurologist, MD, PhD, Fellow of the European Academy of Neurology (FEAN), and Member of the Academia Europaea (MAE). He has received numerous distinctions, including the Francqui Prize, Belgium’s highest scientific honor, and the European Prize in Medicine. He currently serves as Changjiang Scholar of the Hangzhou International Brain Center and Zhejiang–Belgium Joint Laboratory for Disorders of Consciousness (Hangzhou Normal University – Hangzhou Institute of Medicine, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Research Director of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) at the University of Liège, and Visiting Professor at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School.
Abstract:
Understanding how the brain generates conscious experience remains one of the central challenges of neuroscience. In this keynote, prof. Steven Laureys will present insights from three decades of research exploring the neural bases of consciousness across health and disease. Multimodal neuroimaging studies (PET, fMRI, EEG) in coma and disorders of consciousness reveal how awareness can be disrupted by severe brain injury yet retain potential for recovery through neuroplasticity.
These findings suggest that consciousness arises from the dynamic interaction between brain systems supporting externally oriented awareness of the environment and internally oriented processes related to self-referential and interoceptive states. This balance is altered in coma, anesthesia and brain injury, and also varies across physiological or trained states such as dreaming and meditation.
Extending beyond patients, studies in healthy individuals—from elite athletes and entrepreneurs to astronauts—show how training and extreme environments shape brain networks supporting attention, cognitive flexibility and self-regulation.