100 books like Conscience

The brain people are all over art.

Anjan Chatterjee has managed to write a book that a) is very accessible, b) provides thorough coverage of current attempts to understand art and aesthetic experience by using information from the cognitive sciences, and c) outlines an original hypothesis about why humans evolved a love for art. That last part changes the book from a nice review of the topic to a groundbreaking attempt at an explanation of our art practices.

Chatterjee examines our judgments of peoples’ attractiveness, the brain’s system of reward chemicals, and our evolutionary history, in an attempt to understand our passion for art scientifically. 

In an upcoming book on art, I refer to Chatterjee frequently. I don’t always agree with him, but his sensible, clear, and broad approach made his book very useful to me. 

V. S. Ramachandran is a gifted experimentalist and writer who does not hesitate to pursue deep and important questions about our minds. Rather than employing expensive imaging or large sample sizes, he is more likely to use a cardboard box, an old stereopticon, or a rubber hand in his experiments. 

His creativity in finding concrete ways to test seemingly vague but interesting claims about our minds has led to several breakthroughs, in our understanding of phantom limbs and our ability to treat phantom pain, and also in our study or synesthesia—cases in which people see numbers as having colors, for example.

As I can attest, he is able to transmit to his students the idea that pursuing scientific questions can thrilling, fulfilling, and so much fun that you can’t wait to get to work in the morning.

Are philosophers like detectives, in that they chase their culprit over any terrain, and follow any clue? What can count as a clue?

Given the right context, pretty much anything, a pencil placed here rather than there, a picture of a car, something someone said, a fingerprint. Or are we more like technicians, like the fingerprint expert who only lifts and analyzes prints? The problem with being the fingerprint expert is that it can completely remove philosophers from their originating problems and turn them into mere technicians.

Ned Block is a detective, who has followed clues about the nature of consciousness deep into psychology and neuroscience. Here Block argues that there is a genuine distinction between seeing and thinking, and draws out the consequences of that for our theories of consciousness.

Oliver Sacks was a person who really loved science and being a scientist. Instead of describing some neurological condition or syndrome then explaining why that condition matters to our humanity, he describes the condition and the people who have it in ways that make it clear why it matters. 

In Musicophilia, Sacks’ object of study is musical disorders, including cases of people who suddenly showed a great interest in music after having little prior interest, as well as people who suddenly lost all love for music. He also looks at people who have hallucinations of music, and struggle to find where the sound is coming from. 

This title is designed to help student neuroscientists grasp the staggeringly complicated anatomy of the brain by -literally – coloring-in its parts in a way that shows up their connections. Colouring- will take you straight into the Zone, and using this book will allow you to do it in public without people looking around for your carer. If it leaves you with a better idea of how the bits join up, count it as a bonus.

This book includes essays by some of the foremost thought leaders of our time, on the topic of consciousness seen through the eyes of postmaterialist science. Each seeks a scientific understanding of consciousness that is not reducible to physical processes in the brain. Their intention is not to exclude traditional science and its reliance on neurology and the brain, but rather to reach for a broader view of reality, one that includes well documented nonphysical dimensions of conscious experience, including phenomena such as out-of-the-body and near-death experiences, as well as telepathy, precognition, and more.

Each of these authors is well known and respected in their own field and presents here the cream of a lifetime of research in these areas.

Most people think of time simply as a passive, mechanical tool for measuring reality. But in this groundbreaking book, Janet Sussman introduces the idea that time is a dynamic field responsible for creating the material universe. Readers interested in the study of consciousness will begin to understand the importance of time to the unfoldment of unity consciousness and self-realization. 

This book is a brilliant combination of the science of consciousness and human development, written in beautiful, lyrical language. It invites the reader into a world that is non-linear yet coherent. It causes the reader to quantum leap over the logical mind into an experiential event of time as one's own consciousness. The author describes her book as giving "voice to the freedom enjoyed by those who can transcend time through their own awareness and be free of imposed restrictions on the naturally holographic avenues of the mind."

A doctor in early twentieth-century Trieste demands that an eccentric patient write his memoirs as a form of psychotherapy. These pages are those memoirs – the doctor calls them all lies – and form the fictional life story of one of my favourite misfits, the unreliable Zeno Cosini, with his horde of idiosyncrasies. Between proposing to three sisters within an hour and making a fortune on the stock market by mistake, he spends his time nurturing his hypochondria and trying to give up smoking, which means endlessly smoking ‘last cigarettes’. A seminal work of modernism, this is another novel with autobiographical ties to the author, and I left it torn between laughter and tears over just how complex, ironic and funny we humans can be.

To crack the mystery of consciousness requires that one understand the relationship between the physical dynamics of your brain and the psychological dynamics of your subjective experience.

One of the best books to start to build your intuition and understanding of the link between the way of matter and the way of Mind is Vision and Art. I’ve always been particularly enchanted with the book’s account of the famously enigmatic Mona Lisa smile. By understanding the mechanical activity of our mind’s visual circuits, we can start to appreciate how and why we respond to visual art at all.

Les Fehmi (recently deceased, to my great sadness) was a mentor of mine from the early days of biofeedback training decades ago. He was truly one of the great pioneers in the study of consciousness and the brain. This book, co-authored with Jim Robbins, is a succinct presentation of his brilliant discoveries about the deep mysteries of attention as a gateway to experiencing the most subtle aspects of consciousness in general.