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Tor Nørretranders
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The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size Paperback – August 1, 1999

by Tor Norretranders (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 259 ratings
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Explore the depths of consciousness through the essential groundbreaking international bestseller.

“Finally, a book that really does explain consciousness.”—John Casti, scientist and author of What Scientists Can Know About the Future

With foundations in psychology, evolutionary biology, and information theory, Demark’s leading science writer argues a revolutionary point: that consciousness represents only an infinitesimal fraction of our ability to process information. Although we are unaware of it, our brains sift through and discard billions of pieces of data in order to allow us to understand the world around us. In this thought-provoking work, Norretranders argues that our perceptions are not direct representations of the world we experience, but instead, illusions our brains craft to process it.  

More timely and relevant than ever, in light of rapid development in artificial intelligence and large language models, this informative study of consciousness provides the framework to reflect on the inner workings of the mind and understand the self. As engaging as it is insightful, this important book encourages us to rely more on what our instincts and our senses tell us so that we can better appreciate the richness of human life.
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  1. Print length
    480 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Penguin Books
  4. Publication date
    August 1, 1999
  5. Grade level
    12 and up
  6. Reading age
    18 years and up
  7. Dimensions
    7.9 x 5.1 x 1.05 inches
  8. ISBN-10
    0140230122
  9. ISBN-13
    978-0140230123
  10. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Tor Nørretranders is a Danish writer, speaker, thinker, and self-identified “science storyteller” who writes with “a sophistication rarely seen in popular science writing” (New York Times). He is the author of The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size and The Generous Man: How Helping Others Is the Sexiest Thing You Can Do.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; New edition (August 1, 1999)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0140230122
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0140230123
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
  • Grade level ‏ : ‎ 12 and up
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.9 x 5.1 x 1.05 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 259 ratings

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Tor Nørretranders

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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
259 global ratings

Customers say

Customers find the book instructive, thought-provoking, and broadening their thinking. They describe it as a great, satisfying read that keeps them going straight through. Opinions differ on the writing style, with some finding it well-written and intelligent, while others say it's blurry and hard to read.

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InsightReadabilityWriting style
16 customers mention "Insight"13 positive3 negative

Customers find the book instructive, thought-provoking, and interesting. They say it explains a great deal about our culture and development of human thinking. Readers also mention the book is intelligent and funny.

"...No in between. It gets deep into phycology, development of human thinking, the connection between vision and what we think, evolution of why we..." Read more

"This is simply an extraordinary book, one of the most instructive I've run across in 71 years. I note one review says it was life-changing...." Read more

"...Overall the book is interesting and provocative, but also muddled and sloppy in many places..." Read more

"...Especially impressive is the powerful processing capacity of the subconscious compared to consciousness...." Read more

11 customers mention "Readability"11 positive0 negative

Customers find the book to be a great, satisfying, and challenging read that keeps them going straight through.

"...subject that may be, and I therefore found the book to be extremely satisfying...." Read more

"...of decades on all these noveau retro-sensationalists and his book is a worthy read even if long and often repetitive...." Read more

"This is simply an extraordinary book, one of the most instructive I've run across in 71 years. I note one review says it was life-changing...." Read more

"Great book. If you are looking for a different way to see reality that makes more sense this is the book for you." Read more

14 customers mention "Writing style"5 positive9 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the writing style of the book. Some say it's well-written and intelligent, while others find the prose muddled and sloppy in many places.

"...Overall the book is interesting and provocative, but also muddled and sloppy in many places..." Read more

"...The story he tells of James Clerk Maxwell on his deathbed is written so poignantly; last time I reread it, which was yesterday, it ‘almost’ made me..." Read more

"...the substantive problems with this book, I found his writing style to be highly repetitive and yet disorganized...." Read more

"...If you're the kind of person who gives up easily when the prose doesn't flow, it's probably going to sit on your shelf only partly read." Read more

I LOVE this book, the User Illusion.
5 out of 5 stars
I LOVE this book, the User Illusion.
So much so that my original, with passages highlighted and underlined, paragraphs circled, etc…, has become nearly illegible and I had to buy another one!The story he tells of James Clerk Maxwell on his deathbed is written so poignantly; last time I reread it, which was yesterday, it ‘almost’ made me cry.I only wish I could tell him in person of the impact and importance of this book in my life, but thus far I have been unsuccessful. Perhaps this review will suffice.
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Top reviews from the United States

Chuck P in Wisconsin
5.0 out of 5 stars Very deep. Will need to read again.
Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2023
Verified Purchase
I found this book very interesting. I can see this being one of those love it or hate it books. No in between. It gets deep into phycology, development of human thinking, the connection between vision and what we think, evolution of why we have certain fears, etc. I will read this again.
One person found this helpful
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Kristen Freed
5.0 out of 5 stars I LOVE this book, the User Illusion.
Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2023
Verified Purchase
So much so that my original, with passages highlighted and underlined, paragraphs circled, etc…, has become nearly illegible and I had to buy another one!

The story he tells of James Clerk Maxwell on his deathbed is written so poignantly; last time I reread it, which was yesterday, it ‘almost’ made me cry.

I only wish I could tell him in person of the impact and importance of this book in my life, but thus far I have been unsuccessful. Perhaps this review will suffice.
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Kristen Freed
5.0 out of 5 stars I LOVE this book, the User Illusion.
Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2023
So much so that my original, with passages highlighted and underlined, paragraphs circled, etc…, has become nearly illegible and I had to buy another one!

The story he tells of James Clerk Maxwell on his deathbed is written so poignantly; last time I reread it, which was yesterday, it ‘almost’ made me cry.

I only wish I could tell him in person of the impact and importance of this book in my life, but thus far I have been unsuccessful. Perhaps this review will suffice.
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7 people found this helpful
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Bartholomew
5.0 out of 5 stars Very Satisfying
Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2017
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Sure, the author takes a while to get onto the subject of consciousness, but I found the early detour on thermodynamics and information theory to be interesting in its own right. The author a has a penchant for being scrupulously thorough in his discussion of a subject, whatever subject that may be, and I therefore found the book to be extremely satisfying. Eventually, he does find his way to the subject of consciousness, and the thorough discussion of Benjamin Libet's brain stimulation experiments was much appreciated. These experiments had been referenced in other books I've read, but here the experiments and their implications were discussed in detail. Overall, this was a great read. (Hardcopy Edition)
19 people found this helpful
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The Other Guy
5.0 out of 5 stars An outstanding presentation....
Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2009
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This book should be used as educational resource material as early as it can be appreciated.... I'm almost certain that very few that have this kind of responsibility would agree with me, since it would overturn so much of the current mythology of the "I/Me".. As a species that has adopted a sort of self destructive brinkmanship as its culture, based on a simple misunderstanding of the nature of our cognitive processes, we could stand a little help with a reassessment of both where our strengths and weaknesses lie in how what we call the "I/Me" actually works...

The author has done an excellent job bringing to our attention both the miraculous and deceptive nature of perception and shows many examples of how to begin an examination of these issues for ones self, if so inclined...
7 people found this helpful
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Larry Kaplan
5.0 out of 5 stars Way ahead of its time
Reviewed in the United States on January 10, 2002
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First, I must agree that the first hundred pages are tough going and the last chapters may get too metaphysical, but the central theme of the book that our brain presents us with a user interface much like a computer does -- delayed in time, compressed, summarized, edited, incomplete -- has not been discounted in the ten years since the book was written. In fact, more and more experiments reveal the truth of this view. In a December 2001 Nature letter (Nature 414, 302 - 305, Illusory perceptions of space and time preserve cross-saccadic perceptual continuity), another experiment showing that our unconscious gives us delayed and edited information confirms that we exist in a User Illusion. Many of our behaviors, phobias, neuroses, psychoses, and human interactions can be analyzed in terms of this powerful illusion. And learning to understand and program our unconscious is the purpose of life.
28 people found this helpful
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Joao Leao
4.0 out of 5 stars An old gem timely once more?
Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2012
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I recently bought and read this book convinced it was a recent work. As it turns out it is a recent translation of an original published in the early nineties and my notion was surely enforced by the number of recent books on the same "theme" namely the apparently novel revelation that the greater part of our mental activity is not directly accessible to our consciousness! This is the bottom line of such instant best-sellers as "Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior" by Leonard Mlodinow, "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business" by Charles Duhigg, Jonah Lehrer's "Imagine: How Creativity Works" and, perhaps to a less extent, "Ignorance: How It Drives Science" by Stuart Firestein! There is clearly some trend here as James Atlas underscored it in a recent opinion column of the NYTs where he labelled these "Can't-Help-Yourself" books. That may be a bit harsh but what I find more intriguing is that all of these people appear genuinely surprised by a finding that is over 100 years old harking back to Sigmund Freud who made his fame by plunging psychology into the depths of the unconscious. Remember? In any case Tor Norretranders appears to have had one hand and a couple of decades on all these noveau retro-sensationalists and his book is a worthy read even if long and often repetitive. He covers an impressive amount of research covering the last quarter of the 20th century and manages to tie it together though the devices he introduces for the purpose are shallow and mostly misapplied. The first is the word "exformation" which is meant to designate the information that is discarded by a physical system, a correlate of Brilloin's Negentropy which was meant to label successfully eliminated entropy. Unfortunately for both it is quite self-defeating to try to define a system in terms of something that it no longer contains. The same can be said about his revival of that old William James' canard, the distinction between the I (conscious) and the Me (unconscious). Norretranders uses and abuses it to the point that these two sound more like an old married couple bickering about who is in control! Even Freud showed a bit more finesse introducing a distinction between the Ego, the Id AND the SuperEgo! Finally, his appropriation of the User Illusion, a term from software engineering, quickly fizzles maybe because the author did not really know what to do with it. Still most of the many subjects he addresses remain interesting as one can gather from this new wave of writing on the subject though my guess is that these people should have read Norretranders before they penned their own versions of his material. In spite of the problems I list the book is worth the effort or I would not have finished it.

In full disclosure I should point out that, in the middle of reading "The User Illusion" I recalled, from a particularly memorable anecdote it tells, that I have met the author -- in fact had lunch with him -- long time ago, during the first Workshop on Artificial Life in Los Alamos in 1987 or so. What little I remember of my interaction with him left me a positive impression which probably propelled my reading beyond the annoyances I describe. I recall that most of the scientists did not payed much attention to him but were quite impressed with the fact that James Gleick was also attending and he was using an intriguing new device that was to be later named a "laptop computer". Given that Gleick just published "The Information" which, again, appears to cover most of the same terrain, I can't help feel a bit more admiring of Norretranders! Unfortunately neither he nor Gleick seem to realize that the scientific notion of Information is, by itself, quite uninformative! They are not alone in this...
29 people found this helpful
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gammalindasue
5.0 out of 5 stars A singularly remarkable book
Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2020
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This is simply an extraordinary book, one of the most instructive I've run across in 71 years. I note one review says it was life-changing. That's not hyperbole. I've read it three times, and I'm ready to read it again. I still have my hardcopy, but a Kindle version would be to die for. Make it happen, Amazon.
3 people found this helpful
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An Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Very useful. Explains a great deal of our culture.
Reviewed in the United States on May 27, 2019
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Consciousness pulses about 16 times per second or about every 60ms. This means, like a movie, the idea that it's continuous, is an illusion.

So within that 16 pulses per second, we only get so much data, and that which we do perceive is heavily curated.;

I do meditation, so it's fascinating to see the western world catch up and have science to back up what mediators have known for centuries.
12 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Barry falling upstairs
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the most interesting books that I have ever read
Reviewed in Canada on August 18, 2024
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Amazing info to consider!
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BV
2.0 out of 5 stars A weird book that feels like it was printed at home
Reviewed in the Netherlands on November 1, 2024
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I ordered this book because no local bookstore carries it. I was interested in the topic and it was recommended by a friend. When I got the book, the leaves feel like soft/damp regular paper you would use in a cheap print shop. The text also had some letters welded together, it looks like the printer bleeding out on the book paper, which does not feel or look like your typical book paper. The cover felt underwhelming and was printed on black & white cardboard. The only thing that looks and feels right is the spine. I'm not sure if this is normal since I have other Penguin books I've purchased before. This was a weird purchase. I do not recommend.
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Romulo
5.0 out of 5 stars Uma, aliás várias provocações pertinentes e válidas para o mundo atual
Reviewed in Brazil on August 1, 2021
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Não é exatamente um livro "fácil": tem partes que exigem um parar, refletir e reler. Prepare-se para passar semanas intrigado. São conceitos na média complexos, mas as provocações trazidas mais de 20 anos atrás ainda ressoam em minha mente. Se eu disser a você que um texto pode estabelecer uma relação entre consciente, inconsciente, neurociência, entropia / termodinâmica, teoria da comunicação e livre arbítrio, é provável que não acredite, mas é exatamente o que acontece. Acho inclusive que chegou a hora de ler novamente. É uma delícia, principalmente se sente-se confortável com uma pegada mais "científica". Acredito que exatamente por esse motivo ele não seja tão conhecido, uma pena.
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Cayde-6
2.0 out of 5 stars No me ha enganchado, pésimo papel
Reviewed in Mexico on November 17, 2018
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Había escuchado mucho sobre éste libro así que lo pedí.

He leído poco porque como que no te "engancha".

La calidad del papel es pésima por cierto.

A ver si algún día lo termino.
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おしょろこま
5.0 out of 5 stars なんとか読み終えました
Reviewed in Japan on November 21, 2022
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本の厚みに少し気後れしましたが、要所要所に身近な喩えが挟んであり、意外と楽しんで読み終えました。
私の知能では、一読では全て理解出来ないので、何度か読み返そうと思っています。
これ一冊で しばらく楽しめそうです。
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