Feindel Brain & Mind Series: Stephen Fleming

How the human brain thinks about itself: metacognition, reality monitoring and conscious experience

Abstract: The human brain has a remarkable ability to monitor and evaluate its own mental states, known as metacognition. Metacognition enables us to recognise gaps in our knowledge and collaborate effectively. Conversely, problems with metacognition are linked to maladaptive behaviours, such as endorsing false beliefs or being unaware of our limitations. In my talk I will review the development of experimental and modelling tools that allow us to isolate how metacognitive capacity relates to human brain function and supports a rich awareness of our skills and capabilities. I will describe the psychological structure of metacognition across different tasks, and outline evidence for a hierarchical framework in which self-performance is tracked over multiple interacting timescales, allowing people to construct and update internal models of ability in a range of domains. In the second part of the talk I will describe recent behavioural and neuroimaging experiments which ask how and whether people are able to tell the difference between reality and imagination - a core function of perceptual metacognition. I’ll end by considering the implications of a science of metacognition and reality monitoring for theories of human consciousness.

Bio: Stephen Fleming is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Department of Experimental Psychology, and Group Leader at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry. He holds degrees in Psychology and Physiology (University of Oxford) and a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience (UCL), and subsequently pursued postdoctoral training at New York University.

Stephen's research on human consciousness and metacognition (https://metacoglab.org) has been recognised by awards including the British Academy Wiley Prize in Psychology (2016), the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Psychology (2018), the British Psychological Society Spearman Medal (2019), and selection as a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR)'s Brain, Mind and Consciousness Program (2023). He has received fellowships from the Wellcome Trust and ERC, and is currently co-Director of ETHOS, an adversarial collaboration testing higher-order theories of consciousness funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. In 2025 Stephen was awarded the Francis Crick Medal and Lecture by the Royal Society for tackling foundational questions about the neurobiology of conscious experience, and advancing our understanding of the neural and computational basis of metacognition. His 2021 book Know Thyself: The New Science of Self-Awareness has been translated into 7 languages and was the subject of features in Science Magazine, New Scientist, the Financial Times and The New Yorker.

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