Consciousness
by Rita Carter, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20, ISBN 030435600X
YOU focused on the words on this page before you decided to do so: a paradox that throws into question what the word “you” might refer to. Reading about consciousness always brings up self-referential strangeness like this. Yet in Consciousness Rita Carter successfully introduces the richness and dynamism of consciousness studies today.
First come some findings of neuroscience and psychology that deconstruct ordinary notions about conscious experience. These include our blindness to gross changes in a scene when we’re briefly distracted (New Scientist, 22 June, p 26) and, conversely, the…
