Going Inside: A Tour Round a Single Moment of Consciousness Hardcover – April 1, 2001

John McCrone is a researcher of consciousness, publishing in journals such as New Scientist.
He follows the subject from its optimistic beginnings, through its almost disappearance at the hands of behaviourists, to the renaissance of the 1990s tied to new brain scanning techniques.

Decades spent on this subject coupled with acquaintance with the leading researchers has in my opinion produced a remarkable book. He synthesizes earlier research with new findings to produce a fundamentally new picture of how the brain reacts to (or he would say anticipates ) events.

The idea of the brain as a computer is misleading as it suggests an input/program/output model with an ever more complex program to handle new situations. Instead he supports the findings of Donald Hebb in the 1940s showing that nerve fibres make up a network rather than a system of straight lines of stimulus and response, and that there is a high level of feedback.

Brain processing is a competition rather than a calculation and networks evolve their way to stable solutions.

In other words stimuli (including internally generated thoughs), have to compete for attention and are selected or faded depending on the results that they produce. The problem is that all the effort has gone into trying to write more complicated programs for the hardware instead of trying to get it rewire itself and evolve its own processing routines.

As he says with regard to the brain/computer comparison: "Quite simply, one has circuits that are alive, and the circuits of the other are dead."
This is not to say that the system is completely fluid. The brain reaches a balance between main areas that have a firm structure that will inevitably be needed, and more plastic areas that enable adaption to the unforseen.

Analysis of information (and subsequent neural rewiring) are shown to work on a population voting system, i.e. cells representing different aspects of an experience can fire strongly, weakly, or not at all, creating a picture with shades of certainty and meaning.

Action itself is anticipated. As he says, "......the very fact that we can feel caught out, simply confirms that we must have had a set of expectations in the first place." Confirmed anticipation (for an unfamiliar task) allows its quick automation in the brains circuitry allowing future repetition with much reduced effort. University of Washington PET scans give conclusive evidence and are shown in a series of photos.

Other chapters deal with anticipation leading to a focusing of awareness and the critical role of language as an aid to symbolism and trigger for thought patterns. Try making a mental plan without words!

In my opinion this is a major book, particularly for the signposts that it holds for truly intelligent machines.

After struggling with Damasio, Edelman, Freeman et al. McCrone provided the perspective I needed to begin pulling it all together. All these authors are attempting to apply evolutionary processes to explain the workings of our human brain; not so much how the brain evolved but how it continues to use evolutionary process in its workings. Unlike the others McCrone is not a scientist but a science writer and a good one: he gives just enough background on the various discoveries and theories, and explains how the various brain components work individually and together. My only quibble is that his book has only a few drawings of the brain so I had to refer to others to better visualize the components he describes. Read McCrone before tackling the others.

I WANT TO SEE THE TABLE CONTENTS OF AMAZON BOOKS!!!

Mind science is an exciting field, and John McCrone, who is the author of two books on related subjects, and a Brit science writer, having written for the New Scientist, the Guardian, etc., attempts to bring us up to date on the latest findings and speculations. Clearly he sees the brain as a dynamic organism that creates its reality through a combination of sensory input and a constantly readied state of arousal that continually interprets the world and guesses about what to expect next, and then amends accordingly, again and again. Thus his point of view for examining how the brain works is that of a "moment of consciousness."
I particularly enjoyed the chapter on how complexity theory is being applied to brain research where McCrone makes the observation (p. 60) that "The idea of a bounded object [say, us] is really just a convenient fiction." McCrone recognizes that our brains and our minds are part and parcel of the world and cannot be understood alone. The brain is a dynamic entity, not only constantly changing, but constantly interacting with both the environment within and the environment without. Thus McCrone observes that "Given the real world is a continuous place, and so exact starting points can never be measured, this means that it is impossible--as a matter of principle--to predict the behavior of a feedback-dependent system [like the brain]" (pp. 64-65). Ergo, the fall of a strict reductionism in the study of the brain, and the realization that the brain must be understood in light of not only its composition, its components, and its developmental history, but its dynamic nature.
I got less out of the chapters that reported on the current research, partially because of the fragmentary nature of the research, and partly because I am uncomfortable reading about experiments on the brains of monkeys, etc. McCrone recognizes how "animal experimentation" has "tainted the field," and he addresses these concerns to some extent. (See particularly page 112.) Fortunately the development of new high tech scanning devices is allowing researchers to study the brain without cutting it open or by relying on (in human subjects) neurological injuries to give them a glimpse of what is going on inside. I was fascinated with McCrone's report that the way tennis players are able to react to a 140 mph serve is that they anticipate where the serve is going in part by reading the body language of the server before the ball is actually hit (and they don't even know they're doing it)! In fact it is part of the brain's talent to predict. As it readies itself for the next moment, the brain makes a prediction of what that moment will be like. McCrone calls it "riding a wave of predictions" (p. 147).
McCrone makes it clear that it is as much in the process of development that we become who we are as it is in the genetic code. He writes, "there is just not enough room on a DNA molecule" for all the information that the brain needs. The brain, in a very real sense organizes itself as it grows in concert with the world. If you watch a baby, you can see that the baby is working very, very hard to make sense of its world.
In the penultimate chapter, "The Ape that Spoke," McCrone argues that the acquisition of language was critical to the development of consciousness. He states that "Animals are locked into the present tense," living "entirely in the here and now," and that "there is no reason to think that a monkey ever sits around mulling over the story of its life." For those of us who have had close intimate relationships with animals, this is not so clear. Personally, I think animals such as cats and dogs do have some sense of self, and that they do have some experience of the past, and can anticipate the future to some degree. We really don't know about their level of self-awareness. We can be reasonably sure it is less than ours of course, but I think there is a tendency in some quarters to underestimate what animals know. I also don't agree with McCrone's notion that "The invention of articulate, grammar-driven speech was also the invention of articulate, logic-driven thought" (p. 288). There was plenty of "logic-driven thought" before there was grammar; indeed animals often think logically, if their behavior is any indication. (And there is no reason to think it isn't, to echo McCrone's words above.) I think that because some of us are such highly verbal people, we tend not to notice that we think and figure out things logically at a level deeper than that of language. Human language is often a translation of a more basic language. Additionally, I think it is important to make a distinction between "consciousness" meaning "awareness" and "consciousness" meaning "self-identity." Whenever the word "consciousness" is used, I cringe a little because I know it will mean different things to different people and there is the very real danger of talking past one another. Although McCrone does attempt to define consciousness as he goes along, he is to my mind not entirely successful. For example, on page 265 he writes, "So, again, what is consciousness? In some sense, it must be the outcome a moment's processing." Perhaps--but what does THAT mean?
We could argue other points; however, the main thing is this is a good book that gives the reader a vivid sense of what is going on in mind science these days, a field of knowledge that is growing very rapidly, and may some time soon experience a breakthrough of stunning proportions; or we may be entering a transition phase, near "the edge of chaos" from which may come some startling new conception of how the mind works and who we are.