Name: Consciousness and the Brain
ISBN: 9780143126263

Consciousness and the Brain

"A breathtaking look at the new science that can track consciousness deep in the brain How does our brain generate a conscious thought? 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. In this lively book, Stanislas Dehaene describes the pioneering work his lab and the labs of other cognitive neuroscientists worldwide have accomplished in defining, testing, and explaining the brain events behind a conscious state. We can now pin down the neurons that fire when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information and understand the crucial role unconscious computations play in how we make decisions. The emerging theory enables a test of consciousness in animals, babies, and those with severe brain injuries. A joyous exploration of the mind and its thrilling complexities, Consciousness and the Brain will excite anyone interested in cutting-edge science and technology and the vast philosophical, personal, and ethical implications of finally quantifying consciousness"

What Hacker News says

furyofantaresJul 2025

Your own experience is plenty of evidence that you are conscious. And it is reasonable to infer that other humans are like you, especially when they say the same things about experience as you do in the same conditions.

And there is a lot known about the neural correlates of consciousness, what's happening in the brain during events people will then report as being aware of, and how that differs from events they won't report having been aware of.

We don't have a solid or consensus theory about consciousness, but the idea that we've just made no progress is untrue. Some books I recommend are Being You by Anil Seth from 2021 or Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene from 2014z

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SymmetryFeb 2025

There's a whole scientific study of consciousness that actually comes out of behaviorism. The thought is, if I have a conscious experience I can then exhibit the behavior of talking about it. From this developed a whole paradigm of investigation including stuff like the research of subliminal images.

Stanislas Dehaene's book Consciousness and the Brain does a great job of describing this, though it's 10 years old now.

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SymmetryMay 2024

Right, and not qualia either.

I'ts a bit more complicated than just awakeness, though. If you flash an image on a screen for a very short period of time, you won't ever be able to remember what it said or be able to tell someone what it said, but it can still have a slight effect on your behavior for about a second. There is information that are senses are providing to our brain that never makes it to conscious awareness.

Sometimes people have brain injuries that prevent the transfer of information from some parts of their brain to their consciousness. Someone with blindsight has an injury that prevents them from being consciously, in this sense, aware of their visual field. They can still pick up items in front of them when asked. But they can't describe what is in front of them, and if the close their eyes they can't remember where something is and still pick it up like a normal person can.

I'd highly recommend Consciousness and the Brain for an in-dpeth look at research in this area.

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gilbetronMay 2024

A great book on this topic is Consciousness and the Brain ( https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Brain-Deciphering-Codes... )

It really shows how a lot of who we are is unconscious and happening without us being aware.

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robwwilliamsNov 2023

Check out work by Stanislas Dehaene (Consciousness and the Brain, chapters 4 and 5). And Ernst Pöppel’s Mindworks—Time and Conscious Experience.

One odd feature of all work in neuroscience is the unwarranted assumption that the brain has a timebase in the same way that a digital computer has an oscillator clock. That is obviously not true. The hundreds/thosands of brain subsystems have to learn and make their own quirky/noisy timebases and they have to mesh functionally to each other snd to world time via adaptive well-timed behavior. Arguable job number one if consciousness is creating an internal representation of nowness. Even trickier than managing distributed computing across a continent of infrastructure and latencies.

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gilbetronApr 2023

There's a really great book called Consciousness and the Brain that goes into all the various research around how our brain works, and there is a huge amount that we think of as "thinking" that is totally unconscious to us. As I've aged, it seems like more and more of my thought processes are unknown to me. I just get agitated thinking about things, go do something for a while, then my unconscious "me" is suddenly like, "ok, here's the understanding".

https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Brain-Deciphering-Codes...

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