Exploring the Neuroscience Behind Conscious Thought: Uncovering How the Brain Processes Our Ideas

Cliente de Amazon: Fue un regalo, y el tema es interesante, bien desarrollado en este libro. Recomendable.

Mexico on Feb 03, 2021

Samuel McGowan: This is a very good popularisation of cognitive psychology circa 2014, building on the work of John Anderson and Bernard Baars in suggesting an overall architecture to cognition, with experienced consciousness in its place as a limited capacity stage uniting with massively parallel unconscious neural modules. If you are looking for a textbook try Eysenck and Keane, 2020, or Gazzaniga, Ivry and Mancun 2019 however this work is hardly much dated as yet. It is full of references for those reading on. I find in this book that Dahaene underestimates the hard problem of consciousness and overestimates the explanatory power of classical computation, but this only came about for me in the last chapter, and I'm so used to it that it didn't bother me a whole lot. On the plus side there are many reflections on the implications of the empirical evidence for global workspace theory - beginning with attentional blink and masking and dwelling on PET, EEG, and fMRI and TMS of blindsighted people, epilepsy sufferers, vegetative state and minimally conscious cases - towards a general theory of the boundaries of consciousness which is really useful in examining animal...

United Kingdom on Jun 19, 2020

M Belley: Recommandé.

Canada on Nov 24, 2018

Alexandre D.: The writer acknowledges that our understanding of consciousness is rudimentary, so his research is through the "conscious access" approach, which the writer argues is the only one that can be scientifically tested. He omits vigilance and attention consciousness. A very good read, albeit some parts are technical. I recommend this book to yogis who wish to learn about the approach that only the brain, through its complex processes, produces consciousness.

India on Oct 21, 2018

Ozymandias: Lento per le prime 150 pagine per chi ha già una base in Psicologia Cognitiva, ma incredibilmente illuminante nelle pagine seguenti incentrate sulla Teoria dell'autore. Scorrevole nella lingua anche per chi, come me, non è madrelingua. Pezzo necessario da integrare con prospettive più riduzioniste per chi vuole avere un quadro generale del lavoro neuroscientifico sulla Coscienza. Consigliatissimo.

Italy on Dec 23, 2017

Odysseus at home: I loved this book because it is just in the border line that divides science from free and mere speculation. The author is clear to separate what he thinks from what he knows. In doing this, he gives us a lesson of how science advances by keeping under control its most cherished assumptions.

Now the book is about the relationship between consciousness and the brain. To do this, professor Dehaene proposes a mechanism that explains with accuracy what conscience is, how it works and for what. His mechanism is far from being completed because there is an inherent complexity in the brain that cannot be solved with the tools we have today in terms of technology. To be precise, this is how he tells us about his findings: "My collaborators and I have elaborated a theory that we call the 'global neuronal workspace.' We propose that consciousness is global information broadcasting within the cortex: it arises from a neuronal network whose raison d’être is the massive sharing of pertinent information throughout the brain."

Troughout the book, also, in very illustrative seven chapters, professor Dehaene unfolds his theory by explaining what we knew about...

United States on Sep 23, 2014

Bob Blum: As a physician and Stanford researcher (initially in artificial intelligence and currently in cognitive neuroscience), I have been interested in consciousness research for 50 years. How does the brain create consciousness? And, if this is "simply" a story of billions of spiking neurons talking to one another, can it be done in silicon? (If so, this may occasion a profound turning point in human history.)

I have followed Professor Stan Dehaene's prestigious journal publications for a decade as he has amassed a wealth of evidence supporting the view that consciousness is 1) experimentally accessible, 2) has reliable neural correlates (signatures), and 3) is functionally important . Dehaene (a professor at the College de France in Paris and director of the INSERM Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit) is one of the world's leading scholars of consciousness. Fortunately for us, his literary agent, John Brockman (of "Edge" fame) persuaded him to write this popular work.

That Dehaene writes this well in English makes me wonder how spectacularly he must write in his native French. We are not only transported to the cutting edge of research on consciousness,...

United States on Feb 24, 2014