Going Inside: A Tour Round a Single Moment of Consciousness - Hardcover

John McCrone is a science writer and author of The Ape That Spoke: Language and the Evolution of the Human Mind and The Myth of Irrationality: The Science of the Mind from Plato to Star Trek. He has written for The New Scientist, The Guardian, and other publications.

Throw out all the old brain-as-computer metaphors. The emerging reality, which McCrone pieces together from the latest neurological studies, defies the tidy computer analogies, bringing into view a dynamic and unpredictable swirl of processes in the human brain. Peering into these processes, researchers glimpse an unexpected evolutionary competition among rapidly evolving feedback circuits. With minimal reliance upon technical vocabulary, McCrone explains how this ever-shifting competition shapes the complex structure of consciousness, hidden within an amazing half-second of mental anticipation and decision. None of the traditional philosophical approaches to consciousness count for much with McCrone, who proffers a neo-Darwinian account of how social discipline could have fostered introspection, endowing consciousness with its innerness and transforming the first protowords into markers of thought and reflection. Lively and lucid, a book to enlarge our wonder at the marvels of the mind. Bryce Christensen
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