Consciousness and the Brain

This book is a joyous exploration of the mind and its thrilling complexities. It will excite anyone interested in cutting-edge science and technology and the vast philosophical, personal, and ethical implications of finally quantifying what consciousness is. How does our brain generate conscious thoughts? And why does so much of our knowledge remain unconscious? Thanks to clever psychological and brain-imaging experiments, scientists are closer to cracking this mystery than ever before.

What is it for a thought to be conscious? Dehaene reviews evidence (much of it from his own lab) supporting the global workspace theory of consciousness. Entry into that workspace enables a wide range of cognitive systems (for affective responding, for reasoning, and for decision making) to consume and respond to signals generated elsewhere within specialized subsystems of the mind. And the “gatekeeper” of entry into the workspace is directed attention.

In this thorough and rewarding book, the neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene describes his ingenious attempts to locate the neural correlates of consciousness, using experiments to tease them apart from the signatures of related phenomena like attention. He argues that he can identify awareness in babies or locked-in patients, who have no way to communicate. It’s a great scientific detective story.