Consciousness by Gerald M. Edelman & Giulio Tononi

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Gerald M. Edelman

About Giulio Tononi

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Consciousness

How Matter Becomes Imagination

» Gerald M. Edelman

» Giulio Tononi

Penguin
Paperback : 26 Apr 2001

£13.99

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Synopsis

What goes on in our heads when we have a thought? With this book, Edelman and Tononi present an empirically-supported full-scale theory of consciousness. They apply all of the resources and insights of modern neuroscience, from the largest computermodels ever constructed to new experiments that detect the changes in brain activity. This pioneering work represents a landmark in our growing understanding of consciousness. Praise for Gerald Edelman: "The new Darwin...His theory is an enrichment of life itself" - Oliver Sacks, The Times

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Critic Review:

‘This is a remarkable book, sparkling with ideas, steeped in scholarship, offering rich food for thought to specialists, yet written in a manner and with a brevity that allows the general reader to start … and still be in there at the finish. … a real tour de force.’
Jeffrey Gray, Times Higher Educational Supplement

‘Edelman writes eloquently of the transformation of human potential at the point where language and imagination explode into freedom (however limited) and a measure of creative transcendence beyond what nature has given.’
John Cornwell, The Sunday Times

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Brain circuits evolve over thousands of years and continue to evolve in us as individuals through our lifetime.
Nobel Prize winner Gerald Edelman elucidates his revolutionary view of our mental processes in an interview with Mark Wallace of the Financial Times.

‘Together with colleagues at the Neurosciences Institute, Edelman has been looking experimentally at what neurons do during consciousness. Using a clever experiment they have managed to see what happens in the brain when a person becomes conscious of something. The experiment uses a slide containing subtle red and blue stripes painted a right angles across each other like a grid. The clever twist is that the colours flicker so that, at first sight, a person will notice only one set of stripes. It takes a while to register the second set – and as the registering happens, the pattern of activity in the neurons can be charted: “When you’re conscious of red vertical bars rather than blue horizontal bars, certain brain areas light up. I call these neural correlates of consciousness” In other words Edelman is claiming to see consciousness in action.’

When viewing optical illusions, we are only able to perceive one interpretation at a time. Edelman is adamant that consciousness is a process, a chain of events, rather than a ‘thing’ contained in a special part of the brain. Neurons are the equipment used to generate consciousness and awareness.

But he takes great pains to rebuff the interpretation of the brain as a processor or supercomputer as he argues when interviewed by Anjana Ahuja of the The Times last year: “Somewhere along the line, symbolic capabilities became available to the brain in the evolution of hominids. That was another re-entrant circuit. Once you have tokens, you can make up stories, in both the past and present.

“I don’t believe that language is some spooky essential for thought. It’s simply a memory system for putting tokens that absolutely explodes your conceptual capability, that makes it enormous, and therefore it’s the chief instrument in higher order consciousness.

“It’s really interesting to me that English departments have shown more avid interest in this theory than some of my colleagues in molecular biology, and it has something to do with the fact that metaphor is a kind of primitive thinking.

“My challenge, for example, to the computer metaphor for the brain is very simple. How do you explain the first time in all of history when, in an American style diner, one waitress says to the other, ‘The ham sandwich left without paying’?”