STAR TREK STAR : SERIES HONOURS SNIPPET

WHY STAR TREK still matters. Sixty years after its debut, Star Trek endures not because of its aliens and technology, but because of its fascination with what makes us human.

WHEN Star Trek first appeared on television screens 60 years ago, audiences expected science fiction to offer aliens, monsters and futuristic technology. What they encountered was far more ambitious.

From its very first broadcast episode on September 8, 1966, Star Trek established that its true subject was the exploration of humanity itself.

For all its reputation as an action packed space adventure, the franchise has endured because it repeatedly returned to a universal question : What does it mean to be human?

In the first episode, entitled The Man Trap, the alien antagonist survives by appearing to each observer as the person they most wish to see. Dr Leonard ''Bones'' McCoy meets a lost love from his past, others see figures shaped by memory, expectation, desire and longing.

The creature, soon dubbed the ''salt vampire'' by fans of the series, is not simply a shape shifter.

Its power lies in exploiting human perception. Rather than asking viewers to fear an alien with superior strength or advanced weaponry, the episode asks a more profound question : can we trust our experience of reality?

Sixty years on, this question looks remarkably prescient. Modern neuroscience increasingly suggests that perception is not a passive recording of the external world.

According to theories of predictive processing, the brain continually generates expectations and compares them with incoming sensory information.

The philosopher Andy Clark has described the brain as a '' prediction machine.'' Neuroscientist Anil Seth argues that our experience of reality can be understood as a form of '' controlled hallucination '', generated by the brain but constrained by evidence from the senses.

!WOW! thanks Professor of History Steven McVeigh, who teaches in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Swansea University in the UK.