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Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts Kindle Edition
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From the acclaimed author of Reading in the Brain and How We Learn, a breathtaking look at the new science that can track consciousness deep in the brain
How does our brain generate a conscious thought? And why does so much of our knowledge remain unconscious? Thanks to clever psychological and brain-imaging experiments, scientists are closer to cracking this mystery than ever before.
In this lively book, Stanislas Dehaene describes the pioneering work his lab and the labs of other cognitive neuroscientists worldwide have accomplished in defining, testing, and explaining the brain events behind a conscious state. We can now pin down the neurons that fire when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information and understand the crucial role unconscious computations play in how we make decisions. The emerging theory enables a test of consciousness in animals, babies, and those with severe brain injuries.
A joyous exploration of the mind and its thrilling complexities, Consciousness and the Brain will excite anyone interested in cutting-edge science and technology and the vast philosophical, personal, and ethical implications of finally quantifying consciousness.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateJanuary 30, 2014
- Reading age18 years and up
- File size8980 KB
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David Drummond has narrated over seventy audiobooks for Tantor, in genres ranging from current political commentary to historical nonfiction, from fantasy to military, and from thrillers to humor. He has garnered multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards as well as an Audie Award nomination. Visit him at drummondvoice.com. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product details
- ASIN : B00DMCVXO0
- Publisher : Penguin Books (January 30, 2014)
- Publication date : January 30, 2014
- Language : English
- File size : 8980 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 334 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #364,138 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
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About the author

Professor Stanislas Dehaene holds the Chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology at the Collége de France, Paris. He directs the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit at NeuroSpin in Saclay, south of Paris, France's advanced brain imaging research center. He is also the president of the Scientific Council for Education of the French ministry of education.
Stanislas Dehaene is recognized as one of Europe’s most prominent brain scientists. He is well known for his pioneering studies of “the number sense”, the innate brain circuits that we share with other primates and that allow us to understand numbers and mathematics. He is also a specialist of reading and uncovered the function of the ''visual word form area'', a left-hemisphere region that specializes for letters when we learn to read. Those discoveries have fostered his strong interest for learning and education. With his wife Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, he has made fundamental discoveries on infants’ brain organization for language, and on how education to mathematics, reading and bilingualism shape the human brain. He has also observed some of the earliest “signatures of consciousness", i.e. patterns of brain responses that are unique to conscious processing and can be used to diagnose coma and vegetative-state patients.
Prof. Dehaene has accumulated numerous awards and prizes. In 2014, he was awarded the Grete Lundbeck Brain Prize, a 1-million € award which is considered the Nobel prize in the field (with G. Rizzolatti and T. Robbins). He is also a member of eight academies: the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the French Académie des Sciences, the British Academy, Academia Europae, the Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium, and the European Molecular Biology Organization EMBO.
With an h-index of 173, Prof. Dehaene is a Thomas Reuters highly cited researcher. His research has been featured in numerous publications including a full-length portrait in the New Yorker (“The Numbers Guy”, by Jim Holt, 2008). He is the author of five books, three television documentaries, and over 400 scientific publications in journals such as Science, Nature, Nature Neuroscience, and PNAS. 70 of his articles were cited more than 500 times.
His books are a huge success, have been translated in fifteen languages, and several have received awards for best science writing:
• The Number Sense (1999): Jean Rostand award
• Reading in the Brain (2009): A Washington Post science book of the year
• Consciousness and the brain (2013): Grand Prix RTL-Lire for Best science book of the year
• How we Learn: why brains learn better than any machine… for now. (2020) Penguin Viking. Book of the year, the French Society for Neurology.
• Seeing the mind (2023). To appear at MIT Press.
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Most importantly, I thought it might touch on David Chalmer's "hard problem" (qualia, what it feels like to be a bat, subjective experience, etc). Instead it touches on the hard problem at the end, and dismisses it quickly. I'm not disputing his argument that eventually the kind of work he does will solve the problem, but it felt cavalier to me, a la Dennett a little. (I put more stock in Damasio and Solms.)
I have followed Professor Stan Dehaene's prestigious journal publications for a decade as he has amassed a wealth of evidence supporting the view that consciousness is 1) experimentally accessible, 2) has reliable neural correlates (signatures), and 3) is functionally important . Dehaene (a professor at the College de France in Paris and director of the INSERM Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit) is one of the world's leading scholars of consciousness. Fortunately for us, his literary agent, John Brockman (of "Edge" fame) persuaded him to write this popular work.
That Dehaene writes this well in English makes me wonder how spectacularly he must write in his native French. We are not only transported to the cutting edge of research on consciousness, but the voyage is a thrill. As expected, Dehaene is thoroughly steeped in the history of consciousness from Plato, through Descartes, Hume, and the Continental philosophers. His writing is also filled with references to French art, literature, and humanism (like serotonin molecules, that culture seems to have diffused from the Louvre down the Boulevard Saint-Michel and become bound in this book.)
Right from the start (see the beautiful, free Introduction on Amazon) he reminds us that it all began in the caves at Lascaux with the depiction of a dreamer's soul wafting about like a sparrow. Deftly weaving ancient Egyptian mythology with the Upanishads, he transitions to Descartes and his alleged "Error." Rightfully defending his countryman, Dehaene takes contemporary pop-neurosci to task. Descartes was no dualist (body + immaterial soul) blinded by religion. Rather, he was genuinely grappling with the central problem of this book and the field. How does conscious perception, reflection, and deliberation emanate from a machine?
In seven chapters, Dehaene carefully steps us through all the evidence (from his large Paris group and the world's other top labs) of the brain's signatures of consciousness.
How can one even study consciousness in the lab? (Chapter 1) The key innovation was the discovery and exploitation of "minimal contrast" phenomena. When presented just too faintly, too rapidly. or when masked they are completely invisible. But, increase the intensity, duration, or remove the mask and there they are, plain as day. I'll list these, but do yourself a favor and go to YouTube to see them for yourself: motion-induced blindness, change blindness, attentional blink, binocular rivalry, multistable perception. Now you see it; now you don't. (Also, go to Charlie Rose's website and look at the episode on consciousness in which Nobelist Eric Kandel interviews Dehaene and other stars of this field.)
We are obviously conscious, but is there any neural processing of which we are NOT conscious?
(Chapter 2) Yes, most of it! Non-conscious and pre-conscious processing is ubiquitous, functional, and essential. He reviews fascinating experiments that reveal the pervasive and essential role of non-conscious processing in language, vision, hearing, and action. Consciousness is the tip of the iceberg.
Perhaps consciousness is epiphenomenal (a non-functional add-on, like the roar of a jet plane). In Chapter 3 he dismisses that old, profoundly counter-intuitive proposition. His argument here is reminiscent of Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. Fast (nonconscious) thought is fine for practiced, routine, reflexive speech and action. But thinking and action marked by careful deliberation and planning requires consciousness: the ability to maintain a percept in working memory and mull it over.
Chapter 4 displays the core findings of the experimental work: the neural signatures of consciousness. These are what Nobelist Francis Crick and collaborator Christof Koch called the neural correlates of consciousness. (See Koch's excellent work "The Quest for Consciousness") Even invisible, unseen (subliminal) stimuli excite chains of neural firing but only in primary sensory areas. However, when a stimulus crosses the threshold into consciousness, the neural firing is strongly amplified in intensity and distribution as many brain regions ignite and communicate especially prefrontal, parietal, and anterior temporal areas.
In Chapter 5 he describes a tentative theory that accounts for the experimental findings: the global neuronal workspace theory. I'm old enough to recall the origin of this theory as the blackboard model from 1970s AI research sponsored by DARPA that led to the then famous Hearsay-II speech understanding system from CMU. In an interesting quirk of history, this excellent work was dragged into oblivion by the AI Winter of the 1980s. But, the theory itself became resurrected as a theory of consciousness by psychologist Bernard Baars. (See Baars' 1988 A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness). With the 1990 advent of fMRI, this theory became ripe for experimental verification. Entrez Professeur Dehaene. Not only can he explain the lab details from Chapter 4, he has also built a computer simulation of a spiking neural network that exhibits the same behavior.
As you may know, Europe has just embarked on a ten year 1.5 billion dollar project to simulate the human brain. While this project may seem to be irrationally ambitious, I am comforted in knowing that Dehaene is one of the scientists at the helm.
Chapter 6 deals with the crucial topic of coma and vegetative states. It opens poignantly with the case of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the Editor of Elle, who had a brain stem stroke, and though entirely paralyzed (save for one eye), wrote an entire book "The Diving Bell and The Butterfly" by blinking that eye. EEG, MEG, and fMRI signatures of consciousness may in the future help us to decide which coma patients are conscious and which are not.
He closes in Chapter 7 with the future: tests for animal consciousness and machine consciousness. While machine consciousness may someday be possible, it will not happen soon. Nonetheless, this work paves the way to it by showing the functional properties of the only system that we know is conscious: ourselves.
Although I've read widely on this topic (and cover AI and Stanford neuroscience on my website: bobblum) , there was much here that was new to me. This is an outstanding work on the basis of both scientific and literary merit.
On the downside, Dehaene's overarching sense that neural processes will ultimately explain consciousness - understandable given his complete and impressively energetic absorption for years in this framework - leads him to treat the question too cavalierly, giving the impression to the reader - as so many other books in the neuroscience realm - that this is virtually "settled science," that all experience - normal, mystical, spiritual - is simply "generated" by the material brain (as though we actually understand "matter"). Thus for him, Chalmers' hard problem - how physical processes in the brain actually give rise to subjective experience (or "phenomenal" consciousness as opposed to "access") - will simply evaporate "when educated by cognitive neuroscience and computer simulations." The difficulty is that Chalmers' formulation of the problem in terms of "qualia" - explaining how a neural (or computer) architecture generates, or accounts for, the "redness" of an apple, the "blue" of the sky - has been misleading, obscuring the fact that the problem is actually explaining the origin of our image of the external world - not only the whiteness of the coffee cup on the kitchen table, but the cup itself, the stirring spoon, the swirling coffee surface (form, particularly dynamic, changing form, is equally non-computable), the table's stretching oak surface, the tiled floor, the pots hanging from the ceiling, the pictures on the walls... There is nothing of course that remotely looks like the kitchen in the brain; there is no image in the brain, there are only neuro-chemical flows. Yet this is a problem - a problem that dwarfs teasing out the nature of "access" consciousness, a problem for which, after 20+ years of attempted solutions, it is safe to say a good proportion of theorists see a radical breakthrough as necessary - that Dehaene simply asserts, with only a short discussion, will be solved, and solved within the information processing framework to which he gives complete allegiance.
An example of how vastly misplaced and therefore misleading this faith could be is helpful. Henri Bergson, for example, in "Matter and Memory" (1896), 50 years before Gabor's discovery of holography, presciently envisioned the universe - the vast material field in which the brain is embedded - as a holographic field (for this reason the theory was never understood by his contemporaries). Effectively he saw the brain as forming a modulated reconstructive wave passing through this holographic field and "specific to" a subset of the information in the field, by this process the subset now becoming an image - the coffee cup, kitchen table, the hanging pots. Such a view would treat all the "computations" envisioned in the information processing framework (to include the "P3") as being part of a very concrete dynamics - a very concrete wave passing through the holographic field - as concrete, say, simply an example, as an AC motor generating a field of electric force. This would mean that the problem of constructing the operations of the brain, rather than discovering the correct software and/or neural net connections, is in fact a massive physics/engineering problem. A "computer simulation" of an AC motor runs not one Christmas tree light. Since, in this model, the image of the external world (read, our experience) is not occurring within the brain, memory (our experience) cannot be solely stored in the brain, demanding then a completely different notion of memory retrieval and therefore, of cognition/thought. As Bergson's model requires that the flow of time be understood as indivisible or non-differentiable, and for him, the relation of (conscious) subject to (perceived) object is not in terms of space, but in terms of time, even more paradigm changing considerations must be introduced.
Dehaene, however, focused and working so diligently as he is in a standard information processing/philosophical framework, has given little time to these considerations, at least in the book, whether of time and mind, of the deeper nature of the hard problem, of the many, many actual problems with current memory theory and its standard notion (read dogma) of the storage of experience in the brain. This is understandable, but nevertheless the book does a disservice here in allowing readers, with so little space given to a real analysis, to come away with the (rather ubiquitous) impression that, a) this information framework is all there is, and, b) more of the same will solve the problem. Nevertheless, as noted, an interesting, very informative read.
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現在、開発中の脳シミュレータの参考にしたい。
Orientation to the functionality of thinking.







