Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness (Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative) [Hardcover]

Nicholas Humphrey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 31, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0674021797 | ISBN-13: 978-0674021792

"Consciousness matters. Arguably it matters more than anything. The purpose of this book is to build towards an explanation of just what the matter is."

Nicholas Humphrey begins this compelling exploration of the biggest of big questions with a challenge to the reader, and himself. What's involved in "seeing red"? What is it like for us to see someone else seeing something red?

Seeing a red screen tells us a fact about something in the world. But it also creates a new fact--a sensation in each of our minds, the feeling of redness. And that's the mystery. Conventional science so far hasn't told us what conscious sensations are made of, or how we get access to them, or why we have them at all. From an evolutionary perspective, what's the point of consciousness?

Humphrey offers a daring and novel solution, arguing that sensations are not things that happen to us, they are things we do--originating in our primordial ancestors' expressions of liking or disgust. Tracing the evolutionary trajectory through to human beings, he shows how this has led to sensations playing the key role in the human sense of Self.

The Self, as we now know it from within, seems to have fascinating other-worldly properties. It leads us to believe in mind-body duality and the existence of a soul. And such beliefs--even if mistaken--can be highly adaptive, because they increase the value we place on our own and others' lives.

"Consciousness matters," Humphrey concludes with striking paradox, "because it is its function to matter. It has been designed to create in human beings a Self whose life is worth pursuing."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this extended answer to the question, "Can one's consciousness survive after one dies?"-asked by philosopher Thomas Reid in 1775 and Joe King, a disabled country singer, in 2003-Humphrey concedes he is working to "develop a concept of consciousness which we, as theorists, can do business with." He argues perception is neither solely nor necessarily a product of sensation, and, in fact, the two may exist independently of one another. Humphrey simplifies these intellectually rigorous discussions by returning to a central example of a person staring at a red screen. (Thus creating a "red sensation.") Humphrey's conversational prose-the book is based on his lectures-is an odd fit for the scholarly material, but his approach makes his 30 years of experience in "consciousness studies" accessible to casual readers.
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From Booklist

Humphrey's History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness (1992) elaborates the ideas distilled in this digestible precis. Based on the author's Harvard University lectures, it directly addresses the reader as a fellow contemplator of consciousness. That every person knows what it is but cannot give a convincing description of it, is the nettle Humphrey grasps as he explains his view of the problem. Figuratively seating the reader in his darkened lecture hall, Humphrey illuminates a monochromatic screen--red in this case. By what psychological pathway does the viewer experience the redness of the screen? Humphrey classifies the experience of initial stimulation as a subjective "sensation," which through internal feedback loops becomes an objective "perception" of the screen as red. Holding that this cognitive process may be the origin of self-awareness, Humphrey parries criticisms of the theory, and follows the allusion to the academic debate with a narrative of his sensation/perception mechanism evolving from microbe to mankind. Illustrating his argument with the musings of poets and painters, Humphrey stylishly inspires curiosity about consciousness. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (March 31, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674021797
• ISBN-13: 978-0674021792
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 0.6 x 7.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #758,855 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Nicholas Humphrey is a theoretical psychologist, based in Cambridge, who is known for his work on the evolution of human intelligence and consciousness. His interests are wide ranging. He studied mountain gorillas with Dian Fossey in Rwanda, he was the first to demonstrate the existence of "blindsight" after brain damage in monkeys, he proposed the celebrated theory of the "social function of intellect, and he is the only scientist ever to edit the literary journal Granta.

His books include Consciousness Regained, The Inner Eye, A History of the Mind, Leaps of Faith, The Mind Made Flesh, Seeing Red, and Soul Dust. He has been the recipient of several honours, including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, and the British Psychological Society's book award.

He has been Lecturer in Psychology at Oxford, Assistant Director of the Subdepartment of Animal Behaviour at Cambridge, Senior Research Fellow in Parapsychology at Cambridge, Professor of Psychology at the New School for Social Research, New York, and School Professor at the London School of Economics.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Glimpses of a Major Revolution in Perception and Consciousness June 5, 2007

By Dr. Richard G. Petty VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Though I will read a book of any length, I must admit to a fondness for short ones. Particularly if they are bursting with ideas that make me stop and think on virtually every page. This book clearly falls into that category.

Seeing Red is based on a series of lectures at Harvard University, and, as with all his other books, it is written in a simple and direct style.

Humphrey begins by asking his audience to look at an expanse of red. If it is convenient, you might want to take a moment away from reading this to join in with the experiment. Simply look at something red for a moment.

Then comes the first question: What does it mean to see red? We can measure the light and the mixture of wavelengths, but actually seeing red is a subjective experience. So this first and apparently simple question brings us straight to the heart of the great mystery: consciousness itself. Despite millennia of philosophies, experimentation and now the advent of sophisticated methods for peering into the brain of conscious individual, we are still face with the "hard problem:" how do three pounds of physical matter with the consistency of thick oatmeal, give rise to self-awareness, the works of Mozart and Shakespeare, and the insights of Einstein and the Dalai Lama?

Seeing Red is a synthesis and summing up of much of Nick's earlier work, much of which is provocative and controversial, but also brilliant and insightful.

The high school theory of vision, still being taught today, is that first we receive photons that strike the rods and cones in the retina, which in turn generate visual sensations. We then use those sensations to perceive objects in the external world.

From the outset, Nick tells us that this is completely wrong. Instead he claims that sensation and perception are independent mental processes that occur in parallel instead of in a series or sequence of events. He goes on to say that sensation and perception originally evolved for different functions.

Part of his reasoning is derived from the strange and intriguing phenomenon of blindsight. There are people who have sustained damage to the visual cortex and are unable to see anything in part of their visual field, yet they can still make visual discriminations. This implies that they seem to have perception without sensation.

This leads to the next question: if conscious sensations are independent of perception why do we need them at all? The heart of the theory outlined in this book is that when we see the color red, it is not a process of passively receiving impressions or of building up internal images. It is an active participatory process that he calls redding.

Why this is so different from the standard model is that it means that sensation is an active productive activity of the brain, rather than passive reception. This idea has been discussed in psychology and neuroscience for several years, but rarely as clearly as in this book.

For anyone interested in consciousness and the development of greater personal control this apparently simple conceptual shift has some unexpected and rather exciting implications.

We would predict that sensation should be susceptible to "top-down" influences: we should be able to exert voluntary control over our sensations. We already know that to be true: there is a fairly well known exercise taught in some Buddhist traditions in which students learn to experience the whole world through a single color. The model also helps us to make sense of those odd states in which sensations are altered by drugs or illnesses that generate complex images or hallucinations. If vision is an active process, it might help explain how a healer or empath might stimulate the mental states of another person.

So far so good, but now come to the part of the book that is more difficult to accept. Nick claims that we can only have an experience if there is a conscious experiencer. Yet there are countless credible reports - and personal experiences - of meditators and mystics experiencing while their minds are completely stilled. Nick theorizes that the self arises with sensations and that sensation is what makes consciousness matter.

So in this view the created self must be an illusion. But just to throw in another wrench, Humphrey suggests that the belief in a mind-body duality is not just a regrettable mistake, but is instead an adaptation that has helped individuals live longer and more productive lives. So self-deception is hardwired in our genes and our brains.

The part of the book on vision and imagination is superb, but I am skeptical about some of his comments about consciousness and the self: he ignores too much data.

That being said, this book is one of the best mental workouts that I have had in a while: it forces you to think about things that could have considerable practical consequences. And weighing in at a mere 150 small pages, I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in psychology, consciousness, the mind or meditation.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Engaging and Ambitious April 17, 2007

By Prithvi Karthikeyan

Format:Hardcover

Seeing Red is a truly spectacular book - the format is creative and the scope is ambititous yet not esoteric - Humphrey urges the reader to engage with him in an epoché of sorts and simulates a Harvard lecture written in a conversational style and clever graphics. The author successfuly translates his professorial élan into the book and the reader feels invited into the discussion. It is a genuine effort to fuse neuroscience, art, philosophy and literature to come up with a transparent theory of consciousness - no mean feat! The book's potential really lies its ability to stimulate reflection about consciousness in light of recent evidence and ancient conjecture delivered seamlessly.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Refreshingly Clear March 11, 2008

By Peter McCluskey

Format:Hardcover

This book provides a clear and simple description of phenomena that are often described as qualia, and a good guess about how and why they might have evolved as convenient ways for one part of a brain to get useful information from other parts. It uses examples of blindsight to clarify the difference between using sensory input and being aware of that input.
I liked the description of consciousness as being "temporally thick" rather than being about an instantaneous "now", suggesting that it includes pieces of short-term memory and possibly predictions about the next few seconds.
The book won't stop people from claiming that there's still something mysterious about qualia, but it will make it hard for them to claim that they have a well-posed question that hasn't been answered. It avoids most debates over meanings of words by usually sticking to simpler and less controversial words than qualia, and only using the word consciousness in ways that are relatively uncontroversial.
The book is short and readable, yet the important parts of it are concise enough that it could be adequately expressed in a shorter essay.