Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness

By: Patrick House

Narrated by: Taylor Clarke-Hill

A concise, elegant, and thought-provoking exploration of the mystery of consciousness and the functioning of the brain.

Despite decades of research, remarkable imagery, and insights from a range of scientific and medical disciplines, the human brain remains largely unexplored. Consciousness has eluded explanation.

Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness offers a brilliant overview of the state of modern consciousness research in twenty brief, revealing chapters. Neuroscientist and author Patrick House describes complex concepts in accessible terms, weaving brain science, technology, gaming, analogy, and philosophy into a tapestry that illuminates how the brain works and what enables consciousness. This remarkable book fosters a sense of mystery and wonder about the strangeness of the relationship between our inner selves and our environment.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press.

©2022 Patrick House (P)2022 Macmillan Audio

Know what you are getting into

This is an almost poetic exploration of consciousness via 19 metaphoric exercises illustrating the neural correlates of consciousness and Integrated Information Theory among others. If what I just wrote sounds like gobbledygook, you might want to start with Anil Seth or David Eagleman first. This is an interesting attempt at a synthesis, but without more background could be hard going for some readers/listeners.

heady, clear and narrative exampling

heady, clear and narrative exampling.
big-ideas broadly on Consciousness.
aims at multi-perspectival and curiosity reading the topic's current spate of exploring about who we are when we interrogate our interiors.
ably real-world referent.

If you really, really like extended analogies ...

This book reminds me of a collection of childhood stories, like Aesop's Fables, where each story exemplifies an important lesson through an entertaining tale, except in this case, the lessons are about neuroscience. In each of the nineteen stories, the analogy is explained either along the way or at the end.

So you commiserate with the fish whose environment became very crowded and eventually were moved into a bowl -- the fish being neurons and the bowl being your cranium. Or you listen to the history of pinball, where by analogy, the invention of flippers was like the Cambrian Explosion in evolution. There's a story of ancient hut dwellers who trade sculptures, the sculptures representing amino acids, if I recall correctly.

The analogies are masterfully done, some of the stories are mildly entertaining, and there's some fascinating nuggets of recent research, but not what I was looking for.

Pass

Needs better editing. Redundant, somewhat unorganized, vacillates btwn anecdote and science. Underwhelming. I looked forward to learning a lot, so maybe my expectations were too high.