Enchanted Looms: Conscious Networks in Brains and Computers [Paperback]

Rodney Cotterill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 11, 2000

The title of this book was inspired by a passage in Charles Sherrington's Man on his Nature. When that famous physiologist died in 1952, the prospects for a scientific explanation of consciousness seemed remote. Enchanted Looms shows how the situation has changed dramatically over the past forty years, and provides what is probably the most wide-ranging account of the phenomenon ever written. Rodney Cotterill bridges the gap between the bottom-up approach to understanding consciousness, anchored in the brain's biochemistry, anatomy and physiology, and the top-down strategy, which concerns itself with behavior and the nervous system's interaction with the environment. He argues that an explanation of consciousness is now at hand, and extends the discussion to include intelligence and creativity, unlike other books on the subject. This beautifully written and illustrated book will be valued for its provocative approach to one of science's last great challenges. Enchanted Looms will change forever our view of consciousness and our concept of the human being.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The book is well structured, moving easily between anatomical detail, functional theories, methodologies and the analyses of others, making it mandatory reading for those considering doing research on this topic." Times Higher Education Supplement

"In both its details and in overall execution this is a very exciting book. The author substantiates his claim that consciousness and mind are best explained as motor-system functions." The Quarterly Review of Biology

"What is so wonderful about Cotterill's thesis is that he provides a simple yet powerful definition ... worthwile." Journal of the History of the Neurosciences

Book Description

Enchanted Looms presents an explanation of consciousness in the human brain, based on known anatomy and physiology, and it shows how consciousness arose during evolution. It also argues that it will soon be possible to create consciousness in computers. This beautifully written and illustrated book will be valued by scientists and general readers alike for its easy access to one of science's last great challenges. It will change forever our view of consciousness, and our concept of the human being.

Product Details

• Paperback: 524 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (December 11, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521794625
• ISBN-13: 978-0521794626
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,854,716 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Tough going at times, but worth it., February 7, 2003

By 

Daryl Anderson (Trumansburg, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Enchanted Looms: Conscious Networks in Brains and Computers (Paperback)

If you are, like me, an "amateur" when it comes to the study of the mind, you have probably sought to balance your reading of philosophers like Dennett with something more solid from the science of mind. "Enchanted Looms" is a fine place to do that.

This is not a book to sweep through in a few days. You will want to pause and digest. Although Cotterill is clearly aiming at an educated layperson as a reader, he bows, stylistically, to an academic audience. This interfered with my reading of the book. Dozens of times per chapter, he cites sources parenthetically or within the text. Too many sentences begin in the form "The work of _x_ and _y_ has shown..." For the longest time I kept thinking that noting and remembering those names would help me in following a line of argument. This was rarely the case. But then, at times, a backward reference to "_x_" would stump me. Once I learned to glide over these I found it much easier to read the book.

The tie-in with "neural networks" was an interesting process since I had little sense of their importance in cognitive science. Cotterill does a nice job, initially, of showing how such structures might work in both the abstract and at the level of neural anatomy. But, interestingly, he moves on to make a convincing case that such structures cannot adequately model all the functionality of the human brain. I came away from this book with the sense that neural nets are the "Ptolemaic epicycles" of brain science - a paradigm that with growing complexity and constant tweaking can just barely model what we know about a physical phenomenon, but which are not up to the ultimate task.

Cotterill does a nice job of making the macro-anatomy of the brain a part of a meaningful whole. Too many neuro-anatomy-focused books seem to just carve out the various regions and leave a sense of oddly unconnected "vision centers" and "speech centers." "Enchanted Looms" presents much more of the sense of the interconnectedness of those zones that we have chosen to isolate as anatomical pieces. He goes into some depth about how these connections might themselves function as a layer in the processing that we call thinking or sensation, ... or consciousness.

Which brings me, in the end, to the grail in my own "brain-book" search - "consciousness." Sure its fascinating to realize how interesting the study of, for instance, vision, might be, but its that "me" in there, in HERE, that wants some explaining. Although this is not the focus of Cotterill's book, he does propose a very different model for consciousness from any that I have seen - seemingly centered around neuro-motor systems; an odd twist on the notion of a "muscle-head" ! I say "seemingly" because it was really only upon reading this concluding section of the book that I realized I might not have understood enough of the prior 500 pages. Cotterill's argument for this unusual underpinning of consciousness seemed somewhat unconvincing, to me, only to the degree that it built upon elements of his model for brain that I had only partially grasped.

So I will reread this book... a very unusual thing for me, for this topic. It bespeaks the power of the ideas it presents that I know "Enchanted Looms" will be worth that second effort.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow!, December 12, 1999

By 

Richard Hollick (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Enchanted Looms: Conscious Networks in Brains and Computers (Hardcover)

Daniel Dennett doesn't Explain Consciousness and Steven Pinker doesn't really tell us How the Brain Works. Cotterill does both: at a level of detail which allows the expert (which I am not) to evaluate his claims, yet in a style which is always accessible to the scientifically aware general reader. The evidence, getting down to the individual neuron and its dendrites, builds up to an overall picture which shows consciousness to be the outcome of a sort of time-lapse pattern matching process in the brain. This book really tells you how it works: it's not just a bunch of philosophising -- it's all (almost all, 'cos he does allow himself a speculation or two) based on experiment. Cotterill concludes by telling us that he and his students are now working on computer neural networks which should result in a computer which (convincingly) simulates consciousness. [Maybe I shouldn't have given away the ending.]

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great., January 5, 2002

By 

Carlos Camara "marrorris2" (Monterrey, Mexico) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Enchanted Looms: Conscious Networks in Brains and Computers (Paperback)

This is an extremely comprehensive book. It covers many aspects of neuroscience and neural networks. Among a lot of information, there is his theory of consciousness. He bases his view of the mind as action centered, and this is to my mind, a good move. It is no surprising that his model includes sensimotor areas. He also includes the prefrontal, premotor, and the thalamus intralaminar nuclei, forming a loop, in his theory of consciousness. He supports it quite well, and it gives rise to predictions that can be experimentaly tested. The data considered is overwhelming, so even if the consciousness theory end up not being totally right, the book as a whole is still a very important piece of literature in the neurosciences. Qualia as essentialy the effects of muscle-spindles in the loop at first seems confusing, if not implausible, but maybe deserves further consideration. Not a lot of neural network talk, but enough to complement nicely.