The Face in the Mirror: The Search for the Origins of Consciousness (Hardcover)

~ Julian Keenan (Author), Gordon G. Gallup (Author), Dean Falk (Author) "Thirty years ago, the Biami tribe in New Guinea remained one of the few human cultures that did not have access to mirrors or photographs..." (more)
Key Phrases: verbal asomatognosia, mental state attribution, autonoetic awareness, New York, Here's Looking, Bill Clinton (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Why do we experience a sense of self? Is it unique to humans? Is it a spiritual force or a natural function of the brain? Keenan, director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory at Montclair State University, reduces these age-old metaphysical problems to scientifically testable questions and, piece by piece, constructs his theory that the self resides in the brain's right hemisphere. He begins by equating recognition of one's own reflection with self-awareness; as coauthor Gallup showed three decades ago, monkeys, humans' distant relatives, fail the mirror self-recognition test while our nearer cousins the chimpanzees pass, suggesting that self-awareness originated far back in the apes' evolutionary lineage. Children first exhibit self-awareness around the age of two, then quickly develop the ability to take the perspective of another person. Essential to primate society, this ability to "attribute mental states to others" is called Theory of Mind and makes cooperation possible, although, as even chimps know, it also confers a talent for deception. Keenan next introduces brain anatomy and modern neuroimaging technology in preparation for an armchair field trip to his laboratory, where he describes his own research and pinpoints structures responsible for self-recognition in the brain's right frontal region. Studies of patients with an impaired sense of self provide further evidence for the significance of this region. Whether Keenan convinces professional colleagues of his theory about the right brain origins of self, this engaging book, written with Gallup and anthropologist Falk, will delight readers curious about the mind and the scientists who study it. B&w illus.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Humans have it; so do chimpanzees and orangutans; gorillas generally don't; and monkeys--forget about it. We're talking about the ability to recognize one's self in a mirror, which neuroscientists such as Keenan use as an experimental tool for investigating self-awareness. The ultimate goal of such research is to map the areas of the brain involved in consciousness. But between self-recognition and consciousness, there is a halfway house called self-awareness, which is Keenan's primary focus here. He reviews the body of scientific literature, purges it of jargon, and explains in plain language the experiments investigators have performed on primates, children, and people with a brain injury or disease. Intuitive though parents are about their children's mental development, they will find intriguing the rigor of Keenan's discussion about why, for example, Junior has learned how to lie by age three. The author's incorporation of such common parental experiences, plus his chuckling observations about his own experiences of self-awareness, makes Keenan's complicated subject completely accessible. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; 1 edition (July 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006001279X
• ISBN-13: 978-0060012793
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,111,558 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good, but limited, February 9, 2004

By	Carlos Camara "marrorris2" (Monterrey, Mexico) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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This is a good book, a good read and interesting too. One gets a little of anthropology, and a little of functional brain imaging. All of it, of course, involving self-awareness. Keenan mantains that to be self-consicous one must pass the mirror test-in short- to be able to recognize the image in a mirror as yourself and not as another individual. Most higher apes, it turns out pass the test. Children at about the age of 2 or 3 do too. Some autistic children do not, and autism is sometimes refered to as a problem with theory of mind or self-awareness. It seems then that self-consciousness is something some systems have and others do not. Keenan then reviews the literature on the functional imaging of several interesting tasks that seem to require self-awareness, and concludes that the right cerebral lobe is involved, possibly with the cingulate and prefrontal cortex more centrally related. So far so good.

But for Keenan to have entered into such an interdiciplinary debate, he seem to have forgotten that philosophically, his ideas would at most rest on shaky grounds. Let me elaborate. First, he seems to equate self-consicousness with self-recognition. Now the first thing I would ask is if self-recognition is sufficient for self-awareness}. That is, would a computer programmed to respond to internal signals in an appropiate way be self-awarë? I would say not. But Keenan tries to avoid these objections by holding that self-recognition is an ability one gains by vitrtue of being self-aware. (since self-recognition appears to be correlated with other self related cogniitve abilities). But then Keenan wrote a book about an ability one gains after being self-aware, not a book on self-awareness. Writing a book about visual discrimination is not the same as writinga book about vision, even when I can only discriminate between 2 visual stimuli if I can see in the first place. It is obvious that one can still see, but not discriminate between two stimuli (think of prosopagnosia- loss of face-recognition), and it is equally plausible that one can not recognize himself in a mirror but still be self-aware. This example is interesting, because Keenan would claim that there is a difference between not recognizing yourself because you are not self-aware that because you have a visual impairment. But the point is that although correlated-that is- self-awareness usually comes with self-recognition, it is only that, a correlation. It is then unclear why the mirror test should be so special. It may have positives, but I imagine it has many false negatives.

This can be applied to the neuroscience too: maybe the abilities that one gains by virtue of being self-aware are located on the right hemisphere, but this does not mean it is the location of self-consicousness too. Language is located on the left hemisphere, but the cognitive resources (whatever they are; conceptual information, grammar, memory, mental relations, ideas)and the anatomical resources (mouth, tounge, lips) do not have to be located there too. Of course Keenan simply argues that the right might be dominant for self-awareness, but not the only location of a self-awareness module. In that case, self-awareness seems to be a much more suubtle phenomenon that just the collection of all the self-related abilities.

Now it seems to me that Keenan missed the point from the beggining. He tries to separate self-awareness from awareness itself, when it is not clear this can be done. Maybe self-awareness is just regular awareness but with a self-content, instead of a visual-content or a object-content. In that case, what Keenan theorizes about are the properties, cerebral correlates, and species variations of self-contents, but not of self-awareness itself, just like vison research studies the location of object representations in the brain and not the awareness of objects itself. (For an alternative, check out Thomas Metzingers book, The self-model theory of subjectivity, where in order to write about the self, he first wrote 350 pages on a theory of what makes representations consicous. Now that is an investigation of self-AWARENESS)

Keenans speculations on the functions of self-awareness are quite interesting and plausible. In my opinion,at the end he only succeeds in studying cognitive self-processing, but not self-awareness itself. However meanly I reviewed his book, it still seems to me a good read, a good adition into a neuroscientists library, and a thought inspiring discussion of soome very interesting concepts.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Better than most, April 4, 2004

By A Customer

Sometimes funny and amusing, this book serves up the brain and the state of the art of consciousness. Enjoyable to the science reader. A nice read for anyone interested in the brain and the self.

4.0 out of 5 stars Interdisciplinary study, November 2, 2009

By	Sami Hananel - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Thomas Nagel has pointed the diffucties faced by philosophy because of our dual view (subjective and objective) of the world. I think science also faces the same problem. J. P. Keenan's area of research is just on top of this (geological) fault. Keenan chooses rightly to study the observable (behavioral) phenomena
associated with our sense of self awareness and the associated complex of subjective phenomena, like our sense of continuity in time, and mind theory.
The strenght of the book lies in a multy disciplinary approach. Experiments from pschology, neurological studies of pathologies associated with the self, child developmental studies experiments with animals and different brain imaging techniques are presented in a coordinated way. If as can be expected no proof is offered for the two central thesis:
1- The face in the mirror test is strongly correlated with self awareness
2- The right brain may be the dominant partner in our
self consciousnes.
A reasonable and well argued case is presented.
It is only at the end, where J. P.Keenan speculate
on the role of evolution in the genesis of our self
awareness and the possible survival value of our self
conciousness that in my opinion he goes astray and
offers our capacity for deception as the main benefit.
This seems highly unlikly as in the small protohuman groups living in the pleistocene a "deceiver" would have been found out and rejected by his clan, not an outcome leading to a high probability for survival.
Another possibility that he rejects, that our self awareness and the attached sense of continuity is the basis for our capacity to imagine future senarios and plan accordigly may be a much better help for survival.
It may be also that "the theory of mind" is one of the bases for our ability to understand and use language.