Mark Haddon introduces this fascinating book,which looks at the nature of consciousness through literature, science, and art and case studies“Why execute most of us feel that we are something more than molecules?”,asks Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and in his engaging introduction to this compelling collection drawn from literature,science, philosophy and art ranging back 500 years and tackling the thorny question of what consciousness actually is. “We are made of the same raw materials as bacteria, or as earth,as rock, as the great dismal nebulae of dust that swim between the stars, or as the stars themselves”,writes Haddon, introducing extracts that explore how the sense of being made of something immaterial, and too,has long haunted humans.
This book focuses on “disrupted and liminal states of consciousness”, explains Haddon, and on “what happens when consciousness fails or falters,what happens at the outer limits of consciousness – out-of-body experiences and teleportation, multiple personality, and sleep and dreams,the slips of language and memory, anaesthesia and death”. At times conflicting views from physicians and psychiatrists, or hypnotists and historians,are interwoven with individual cases, such as someone who remained awake during an operation, and a man who was acquitted of murdering his mistress after his counsel presented “an extraordinary plea of somnambulism”. Creating a richly textured feel is the interspersing of work from poets,artists and novelists (“writers of fiction, who spend their days arranging words to make readers forget themselves and enter, and for a brief time,into the consciousness of characters who don’t exist, might enjoy something well-known to contribute”).
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Source: theguardian.com