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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Don't buy for a light read!,
By
This review is from: Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain: The Evolution of Consciousness (Hardcover)
Damasio discusses the phenomenon of consciousness mainly from the perspectives of neurobiology and evolutionary biology, but also makes interesting points about the philosophical, psychological and cultural significance of his ideas. If you are an interested layman like me rather than an expert, then you might find it helpful to read Chapters 1, 10 and 11 first in order to gain a broad understanding of the framework being offered. Chapters 2-9 are often highly detailed and technical, and threaten information overload if delved into unprepared.As the title of the book indicates, Damasio argues that in order to be conscious a brain needs to construct 'maps' or 'images' of the knower as well as of the known. Subjectivity requires a subject, but the subject isn't a soul or a homunculus but a self which is being continually generated by interacting neural structures. In the course of evolution, processes supplying a protoself developed into processes supplying a core self, which in turn developed into processes supplying the autobiographical self typical of humans.
34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Frustrating and disappointing,
By
This review is from: Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain: The Evolution of Consciousness (Hardcover)
Having had a longstanding interest in philosophy of mind and the problem of consciousness, I was looking forward to reading this book. Damasio has clearly acquired a reputation over the last few years, though I had not read anything of his previously. As a consultant physician with a reasonable knowledge of neuroanatomy and neuroscience, I felt reasonably well equipped to negotiate the trickier parts of the text. As I progressed through the text, however, I became more and more frustated by Damasio's apparent inability to edit out what is not essential to the idea being communicated. There is simply to much detail in all the wrong places. The result of this is that really important ideas are almost completely submerged under a mass of information, much of which is only marginally relevant to what is being communicated.This is a common fault with some scientists, but should be corrected by firm editing. There is simply too much information in relation to the ideas presented, even though some of the ideas are original and controversial. I found myself having to take a deep breath each time I picked it up, wondering if I could really be bothered wading through all the background noise to harvest the occasional nuggets of gold. I did make it to the end, but I can't honestly say the journey was worth it.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Conflict with Neuroscience,
By
This review is from: Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain: The Evolution of Consciousness (Hardcover)
The merits of this book lie in the clarity of expression, which makes difficult material accessible to a lay audience, and encourages us to think about the whole area of consciousness and the self. The author's main theme is the influence of inputs from the body on consciousness. In itself this represents an advance on much of twentieth century consciousness studies, with its tendency to view the brain as an isolated computer.Problems arise with the degree of emphasis on bodily inputs, at the expense of inputs from the external world. The author focuses almost exclusively on inputs from the body to the brain stem. This approach looks to ignore a lot of what has been going on in recent neuroscience, where there is a model of sensory inputs from the external world that are evaluated in the orbitofrontal cortex. Processing here directly correlates to subjective experience, with this region projecting to the basal ganglia areas that are important in determining behaviour. Damasio does lay stress on the role of dopamine and other neuromodulators, but does not bring out the fact that although the nuclei producing these molecules are in the brain stem, it is the basal ganglia that are substantially responsible for their release into the rest of the brain. He also fails to say much about how sensory inputs are processed by the amygdala and orbitofrontal before being signaled to the body, creating an interactive process rather than the simple feed forward implied in this book. In all Damasio has given us a model that is in significant conflict with some recent research. This is not to say his position is wrong, but he needs to provide more justification as to why his picture is at such variance with this research.
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