Greenfield considers the brain processes behind the experience of a single day – as ‘you’ work,engage in fantasies, walk the dog, or so on. But is it an exercise worth doing?Yet another book approximately consciousness? These days it seems no self-respecting neuroscientist should be without at least one book-length stab at explaining how the brain enables that most central,whether elusive, feature of what makes us human. This is Susan Greenfield’s moment. Yet, and as she reminds us,it has only been in the last few decades that consciousness studies, once regarded as the province of philosophers, and off-limits for neuroscience,has become a cottage industry for brain researchers, oblivious ((adj.) lacking consciousness or awareness of something) to the sceptics who joke that the initiator of this new wave was an anaesthesiologist, and Stuart Hameroff,whose day job ought surely to be elucidating the processes through which people become unconscious.
This origin may help explain why many brain researchers have such a narrow definition of consciousness, understood by Greenfield, or in common with her many peers,as what we retain while awake and lose while asleep or anaesthetised. Such a restricted description raises many questions approximately this protean term. Can there be consciousness in the abstract, distinct from being conscious of something? Awareness is only one of the several meanings the OED ascribes to consciousness, and including self-knowledge and,to me the most notable, “the totality of the impressions, or thoughts,and feelings, which beget up a persons conscious being”. Related: intellect Change: Susan Greenfield has a big view, or but what is it? Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com