From the Publisher
This book's spunky writing and popular topic should have made transforming it into an appealing audio an easy proposition. But David Drummond's repetitive tonal patterns give the production a flat quality that falls short of making this title the "joyous exploration of the mind" that the publisher claims it to be. Drummond's phrasing is always clear, but he repeats the same pitch sequences again and again. However, the author's boyish enthusiasm for this kind of psychological inquiry saves the production and helps it deliver a stirring look at how today's scientists are parsing the experience of being conscious. T.W.
JULY 2014 - AudioFile
This book’s spunky writing and popular topic should have made transforming it into an appealing audio an easy proposition. But David Drummond’s repetitive tonal patterns give the production a flat quality that falls short of making this title the “joyous exploration of the mind” that the publisher claims it to be. Drummond’s phrasing is always clear, but he repeats the same pitch sequences again and again. However, the author’s boyish enthusiasm for this kind of psychological inquiry saves the production and helps it deliver a stirring look at how today’s scientists are parsing the experience of being conscious. T.W. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2013-11-04
Dehaene (Experimental Cognitive Psychology/Collège de France; Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention, 2009) delivers a detailed popular account of what he and fellow researchers have discovered about how perceptions become thoughts. Scientists once agreed with laymen that consciousness was a mystical phenomenon beyond the reach of experiments. Though many laymen still believe in that idea, scientists changed their minds more than 30 years ago. We pay attention to one thing at a time. Life would be impossible if the brain didn't suppress almost everything our senses detect. This makes "eyewitness" testimony unreliable, and the Internet teems with clips of experimental subjects blithely ignoring the obvious. LSD users describe deeply profound perceptions, but they are simply overwhelmed with information since the drug turns off the brain's suppressive function, making everything equally important. The unconscious is not merely a Freudian conjecture. Its operations are visible on brain imaging procedures and amenable to experiments. Furthermore, humans overestimate the power of consciousness. We routinely select a fraction of our unconscious pictures, amplify, name, memorize them, and use them to plan our actions. Consciousness research is turning up useful information. Catastrophic brain damage often reduces victims to vegetative or locked-in states during which they sleep and wake but remain unresponsive. New tests reveal a few whose brains (but not their bodies) respond to questions as if they were conscious. Barely conscious patients with relatively intact cerebral cortexes occasionally improve dramatically during electrical stimulation of the thalamus, a deep brain structure that regulates vigilance. "What is certain," writes the author, "is that, in the next decades, the renewed interest in coma and vegetative states…will lead to massive improvements in medical care." A revealing and definitely not dumbed-down overview of what we know about consciousness.
