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The Unity of Consciousness: Binding, integration and dissociation edited by Axel Cleeremans, Oxford University Press, £35/$59.50, ISBN 0198508573 Reviewed by Steven Rose

IT has become fashionable for philosophers and scientists to fill books about this intangible process that we assume all humans share – consciousness. In the old days it was easy. We all had souls, or at least minds, and their study was the province of theologians and philosophers. Brains were the neuroscientist’s concern, who when pressed, would simply claim that consciousness was a more or less irrelevant spin-off from cerebral activity – to worry about it was to…

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