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Mental Health Books:
The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach

Today's shopping tips: "Before committed to purchasing, best is first reviewing several books ..."

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Manufacturer: Roberts & Company Publishers

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Consciousness is one of science’s last great unsolved mysteries. How can the salty taste and crunchy texture of potato chips, the unmistakable smell of dogs after they have been in the rain, or the exhilarating feeling of hanging on tiny fingerholds many feet above the last secure foothold on a cliff, emerge from networks of neurons and their associated synaptic and molecular processes? In The Quest for Consciousness, Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch explores the biological basis of the subjective mind in animals and people. He outlines a framework that he and Francis Crick (of the "double helix") have constructed to come to grips with the ancient mind-body problem. At the heart of their framework is a sustained, empirical approach to discovering and characterizing the neuronal correlates of consciousness – the NCC – the subtle, flickering patterns of brain activity that underlie each and every conscious experience.


PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS:

Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 153
EAN: 9780974707709
ISBN: 0974707708
Label: Roberts & Company Publishers
Manufacturer: Roberts & Company Publishers
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 429
Publication Date: 2004-03
Publisher: Roberts & Company Publishers
Studio: Roberts & Company Publishers


SIMILAR ITEMS:

• Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul
• In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind
• Consciousness: An Introduction
• A Universe Of Consciousness How Matter Becomes Imagination
• Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness


CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

Intellegent and well written -
This book is excellent for anyone who wants a intelligent account of the brain and the neural correlates for consciousness. It gives a good account of the research that has been done and its theoretical aspect is well thought out. Recommended for anyone with a minimal psychology, biology, or philosophy background.


Oh what fun!!! -
I had a hard time putting this book down and couldn't wait to rush home from work to finish reading it. Very well written, entertaining, and most importantly ... jam packed with information. The author writes in a way that a retarded monkey could understand and you put the book down coming away with a better understanding of how your brain works and responds to certain stimuli. It was highly enjoyable to imagine and try to activate the different areas in the brain as I read over the descriptions. I most certainly recommend picking up this book and, should you be inclined, reading it with some CB1 and CB2 receptor stimulation :) . High marks all around and hopefully there'll be a follow up with lots more research.

Pure eliminativism without philosophical sophistication -
Vision. Attention. Temporal procesing. Consciousness. Subject these areas to orderely analysis and the neurl correlates of consciousness are vaguely hoving into view. This essentially is the strategy pursued in the book. Since the visual cortex has received an enormous amount of scrutiny, the book has a rich stream of theory and result to draw upon. Secondly, the connection between visual processing and attention has long been noted in early infant development - joint attention being a developmental milestone. A range of studies of various brain insults have indicated that impaired temporal processing affects the unity of report self-awareness. So far the book is on the winning track. However, when it comes to grounding consciousness the evidence is much thinner. There is a still a huge amount about the brain we simply do not understand, e.g. from what kind of computational model (if any) is appropriate to the function and organisation of large ranges of nuclei. Koch has shielded himself somehat by sticking with largely established results. There is an amount of question-begging nevertheless. Overall the latter fifty pages focus on the NCC idenitifcation probelsm and in line with our lack of knowledge, the coverage is patchy. One naggign question that is not addressed is whether consciousness is the 'same' for everyone? For example, research into autism, congential blindness and congenital deafness has revealed that the world of people and self are apprehended differently. It would have been interesting to have Koch's views on the 'consciousness' of the impaired mind - or impaired brain.

While I found the book intersting to read I was not very satisfied at the end of it. A savannah of philosophical questions are simply overlooked. Secondly, many paragraphs and arguments are prefixed with the phrase 'Francis and I...' This was entirely unnecesary and suggested either grandiosity or else a thinness of argument that needed the heft of the fame of a historical figure to get it through the door. It would be very intersting to read another edition of this book where more weight was given to the philosophical and computational conundrums that accompany eliminativist thinking. Despite these reservations, it is a book worth musing over.

a.k.a. visual perception awareness -
Koch's book takes an important look at consciousness from a neuro-scientific perspective, as understood through the visual processing system (the most intensively studied). He relies primarily on monkey studies, but does a good job with technical material.

What causes consciousness? -
This is a great book that describes where we stand in the search for neuronal correlates of consciousness (NCC). The problem has been attacked by people from various different fields. Still, it has to be a biology problem. Consciousness clearly resides in the brain. If only we had plenty of examples of brain-damaged people ... some of whom clearly lacked consciousness, some who were almost conscious, some who were certainly conscious, some who were uncertainly conscious .... then maybe we'd work out what the key was. Luckily, we don't have all that many brain-damaged subjects.

Koch takes this sort of approach to the problem of discovering the NCC: he tries "to quantitatively correlate the receptive field properties of individual neurons to conscious perception." If there's no map between certain cells and the structure of a conscious perception, then it's unlikely that these cells are sufficient for that conscious percept. That means looking at what we'd normally think of as vision problems, optical illusions, attention loss, long and short term memory, and various automatic and semi-automatic responses to stimuli. What amazed me most was that the work on this subject is still easily readable by the layman.

One of the more interesting questions Koch raises is this: since consciousness resides in the brain, do we get two consciousnesses when we split the brain in two? Actually, (as Koch explains) this was studied by Roger Sperry, whose split-brain experiments on monkeys and other animals in the 1950s and 1960s showed that the two sides of the brain easily learn different responses to stimuli, indicating that these animals effectively possess two separate minds. There are, of course, as Koch describes, some human split-brain patients who also demonstrate this.

It's an interesting book that is easy to read. It's sobering to realize how little progress we've made on such a fundamental question.

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