In which a scientist searches for an empirical explanation for phenomenal experience, spurred by his instinctual belief that life is meaningful. What links conscious experience of pain, joy, color, and smell to bioelectrical activity in the brain? How can anything physical give rise to nonphysical, subjective, conscious states? Christof Koch has devoted much of his career to bridging the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the physics of the brain and phenomenal experience. This engaging book-part scientific overview, part memoir, part futurist speculation-describes Koch's search for an empirical explanation for consciousness. Koch recounts not only the birth of the modern science of consciousness but also the subterranean motivation for his quest-his instinctual (if "romantic") belief that life is meaningful. Koch describes his own groundbreaking work with Francis Crick in the 1990s and 2000s and the gradual emergence of consciousness (once considered a "fringy" subject) as a legitimate topic for scientific investigation. Present at this paradigm shift were Koch and a handful of colleagues, including Ned Block, David Chalmers, Stanislas Dehaene, Giulio Tononi, Wolf Singer, and others. Aiding and abetting it were new techniques to listen in on the activity of individual nerve cells, clinical studies, and brain-imaging technologies that allowed safe and noninvasive study of the human brain in action. Koch gives us stories from the front lines of modern research into the neurobiology of consciousness as well as his own reflections on a variety of topics, including the distinction between attention and awareness, the unconscious, how neurons respond to Homer Simpson, the physics and biology of free will, dogs, Der Ring des Nibelungen, sentient machines, the loss of his belief in a personal God, and sadness. All of them are signposts in the pursuit of his life's work-to uncover the roots of consciousness.

The title of this book reflects the main themes from 50 years of Susan Bach's analytical work with spontaneous pictures and in her "blue room." In working with spontaneous pictures and drawings, she perceived the expression of deep connections between psyche and soma and learned that "it knows within us" when either healing or death is imminent. Talking with Susan Bach about her work was inspiring and humbling and, drinking coffee as only she could make it, one felt deeply privileged to be studying with someone who brought so much intuition and intellectual understanding to the contemplation of the human psyche. The humbling part of the conversation came from wondering how to move one's own work towards the paths she was opening up. The purpose of this collection of essays is to show how the work of connecting and finding meaning continues and advances, whether through pictures, objects, dreams or other images and myths. The contributors have in common both a Jungian background and their having made distinguished contributions in their own specialties.

The so-called "hard problem" of consciousness, i.e. the problem of explaining how and why we have conscious experiences, has received different formulations across time. Back in 1868, Thomas Henry Huxley suggested that the mystery of consciousness resides somewhere -- or somehow -- in the activity of the brain. Since then, both clinical and basic neurosciences have taken the problem of consciousness seriously, joining the allied disciplines of philosophy and psychology in the seemingly insurmountable quest for consciousness. This book presents some of the latest research in the multidisciplinary field of consciousness studies, dealing with both theoretical and experimental aspects encompassing a wide range of normal and pathological states of consciousness.

"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."

What altered states of consciousness-the dissolution of feelings of time and self-can tell us about the mystery of consciousness. During extraordinary moments of consciousness-shock, meditative states and sudden mystical revelations, out-of-body experiences, or drug intoxication-our senses of time and self are altered; we may even feel time and self dissolving. These experiences have long been ignored by mainstream science, or considered crazy fantasies. Recent research, however, has located the neural underpinnings of these altered states of mind. In this book, neuropsychologist Marc Wittmann shows how experiences that disturb or widen our everyday understanding of the self can help solve the mystery of consciousness. Wittmann explains that the relationship between consciousness of time and consciousness of self is close; in extreme circumstances, the experiences of space and self intensify and weaken together. He considers the emergence of the self in waking life and dreams; how our sense of time is distorted by extreme situations ranging from terror to mystical enlightenment; the experience of the moment; and the loss of time and self in such disorders as depression, schizophrenia, and epilepsy. Dostoyevsky reported godly bliss during epileptic seizures; neurologists are now investigating the phenomenon of the epileptic aura. Wittmann describes new studies of psychedelics that show how the brain builds consciousness of self and time, and discusses pilot programs that use hallucinogens to treat severe depression, anxiety, and addiction. If we want to understand our consciousness, our subjectivity, Wittmann argues, we must not be afraid to break new ground. Studying altered states of consciousness leads us directly to the heart of the matter: time and self, the foundations of consciousness.

"Science as a Spiritual Practice" is in three parts. In the first part the author argues that there are problems with materialism and that self-transformation could lead individual scientists to more comprehensive ways of understanding reality. In the second part he takes on the contentious notion of inner knowledge and shows how access to inner knowledge could be possible in some altered states of consciousness. The third part is an analysis of the philosophy of Franklin Wolff, who claimed that the transcendent states of consciousness which occurred for him resulted from his mathematical approach to spirituality.

"A fascinating thesis and a timely synthesis.... Becker urges the reader to view certain arcane cultural rituals as being in the mainstream of spiritual development and argues that the resulting trance-like states may relate to the basic fabric of emotions and consciousness, which are our ancestral, animalian heritage. This is both a risky and courageous undertaking that challenges both cultural and neuroscientific studies."
Jaak Panksepp, author of Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

In Deep Listeners, Judith Becker brings together scientific and cultural approaches to the study of music and emotion, and music and trancing. Becker claims that persons who experience deep emotions when listening to music are akin to those who trance within the context of religious rituals. Using new discoveries in the fields of neuroscience and biology, Deep Listeners outlines an emotion-based theory of trance using examples from Southeast Asian and American musics. A companion CD includes excerpts from several of the musical genres under discussion, and a 16-page color insert presents vivid documentation of the global experience of "deep listening.""

"With a new chapter"
This new edition of Herbert Fingarette's classic study in philosophical psychology now includes a provocative recent essay on the topic by the author. A seminal work, the book has deeply influenced the fields of philosophy, ethics, psychology, and cognitive science, and it remains an important focal point for the large body of literature on self-deception that has appeared since its publication.
How can one deceive oneself if the very idea of deception implies that the deceiver knows the truth? The resolution of this paradox leads Fingarette to fundamental insights into the mind at work. He questions our basic ideas of self and the unconscious, personal responsibility and our ethical categories of guilt and innocence. Fingarette applies these ideas to the philosophies of Sartre and Kierkegaard, as well as to Freud's psychoanalytic theories and to contemporary research into neurosurgery. Included in this new edition, Fingarette's most recent essay, "Self-Deception Needs No Explaining (1998)," challenges the ideas in the extant literature.

One of America's preeminent psychiatrists draws on his famous Study of Adult Development to give us an exhilarating look at how the mind's defenses work. What we see as the mind's trickery, George Vaillant tells us, is actually healthy. What's more, it can reveal the mind at its most creative and mature, soothing and protecting us in the face of unbearable reality, managing the unmanageable, ordering disorder. And because creativity is so intrinsic to this alchemy of the ego, Vaillant mingles his studies of obscure lives with psychobiographies of famous artists and others--including Florence Nightingale, Sylvia Plath, Anna Freud, and Eugene O'Neill.

"Lucid, responsible, and tremendously enriching." —Neil Postman

In this groundbreaking book, a world authority on human communication and communication therapy points out a basic contradiction in the way therapists use language. Although communications emerging in therapy are ascribed to the mind's unconscious, dark side, they are habitually translated in clinical dialogue into the supposedly therapeutic language of reason and consciousness. But, Dr. Watzlawick argues, it is precisely this bizarre language of the unconscious which holds the key to those realms where alone therapeutic change can take place.

Dr. Watzlawick suggests that rather than following the usual procedure of interpreting the patient's communications and thereby translating them into the language of a given psychotherapeutic theory, the therapist must learn the patient's language and make his or her interventions in terms that are congenial to the patient's manner of conceptualizing reality. Only in that way, he shows, can the therapist effectively bring about genuine changes and problem resolutions. Drawing on the work of Milton H. Erickson, he supports his findings with many (and often amusing) examples.

This book, then, is a virtual introductory course to the grammar and language of the unconscious.

Addressing one of the most fundamental issues in any examination of human experience, this important new work connects evolutionary biological concepts to modern psychoanalytic theory and the clinical encounter. Synthesizing their years of experience in the practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, the authors provide a comparative psychoanalytic map of current theoretical controversies and a new way of deconstructing the hidden assumptions that underlie Freudian, Ego Psychological, Kleinian, Object Relational, Self Psychological, and Interpersonal theories. In so doing, they provide a new vantage point from which to integrate competing models into a larger picture that more fully embraces the many facets of human nature. Moreover, they offer clinicians a new framework with which to understand and respond to the inevitable paradoxes and conflicts that arise in the therapeutic relationship.

An argument that the meaning of written or auditory linguistic signals is not derived from the input but results from the brain's internal construction process. When we read a text or listen to speech, meaning seems to be given to us instantaneously, as if it were part of the input. In Meaning in the Brain, Giosue Baggio explains that this is an illusion created by the tremendous speed at which sensory systems and systems for meaning and grammar operate in the brain. Meaning, Baggio argues, is not derived from input but results from the brain's internal construction process. With this book, Baggio offers the first integrated, multilevel theory of semantics in the brain, describing how meaning is generated during language comprehension, production, and acquisition. Baggio's theory draws on recent advances in formal semantics and pragmatics, including vector-space semantics, discourse representation theory, and signaling game theory. It is designed to explain a growing body of experimental results on semantic processing that have accumulated in the absence of a unifying theory since the introduction of electrophysiology and neuroimaging methods. Baggio argues that there is evidence for the existence of three semantic systems in the brain-relational semantics, interpretive semantics, and evolutionary semantics-and he discusses each in turn, developing neural theories of meaning for all three. Moreover, in the course of his argument, Baggio addresses several long-standing issues in the neuroscience of language, including the role of compositionality as a principle of meaning construction in the brain, the role of sensory-motor processes in language comprehension, and the neural and evolutionary links among meaning, consciousness, sociality, and action.

An integrated study of the history, philosophy, and science of color that offers a novel theory of the metaphysics of color. Is color real or illusory, mind independent or mind dependent? Does seeing in color give us a true picture of external reality? The metaphysical debate over color has gone on at least since the seventeenth century. In this book, M. Chirimuuta draws on contemporary perceptual science to address these questions. Her account integrates historical philosophical debates, contemporary work in the philosophy of color, and recent findings in neuroscience and vision science to propose a novel theory of the relationship between color and physical reality. Chirimuuta offers an overview of philosophy's approach to the problem of color, finds the origins of much of the familiar conception of color in Aristotelian theories of perception, and describes the assumptions that have shaped contemporary philosophy of color. She then reviews recent work in perceptual science that challenges philosophers' accounts of color experience. Finally, she offers a pragmatic alternative whereby perceptual states are understood primarily as action-guiding interactions between a perceiver and the environment. The fact that perceptual states are shaped in idiosyncratic ways by the needs and interests of the perceiver does not render the states illusory. Colors are perceiver-dependent properties, and yet our awareness of them does not mislead us about the world. Colors force us to reconsider what we mean by accurately presenting external reality, and, as this book demonstrates, thinking about color has important consequences for the philosophy of perception and, more generally, for the philosophy of mind.

What is consciousness? The answer to this question has eluded thinkers for millennia. In modern times, scientists have struggled to find a complete answer, often hampered by the limitations of their particular specialisms. Derek Steinberg's unique approach constructs a multi-faceted model of mind involving science and the arts, from which the sense of personal identity emerges. In a masterful tour-de-force, he establishes links between otherwise distinct or even conflicting disciplines. In this radical departure, the author argues that the arts, literature and human culture in the broadest sense make their contributions to understanding consciousness and the sense of self, though they are rarely acknowledged in mainstream debate. Rather than focusing only on what lies between the ears, Steinberg casts a wide net. He explores the connections between sciences and the humanities as he takes the debate into new areas. This book is fascinating and enlightening reading for everyone interested in human nature and the psyche, as well as for students and professionals in the fields of neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, medicine, social science, anthropology, philosophy and the arts, for whom the book is a breakthrough in the challenge of cross-disciplinary collaboration.

The experience of emotion is a ubiquitous component of the stream of consciousness; emotional qualia interact with other contents and processes of consciousness in complex ways. Recent research has supported the hypothesis that important functional aspects of emotion can operate outside the conscious awareness. Primary types of emotions are found in animals, while secondary, more complex types are involved in interpersonal relationships. Emotions both influence genetic repair mechanisms of individuals and are responsible for group behavior. Many scholars and scientists believe that no scientific or philosophic account of consciousness can be complete without an understanding of the role of emotion.

What drives us to make decisions? Future-Minded explores the psychological processes of agency and control. If you've ever wondered why we think of coincidences as matters of fate rather than the result of the laws of probability, this book provides the answer. From memory and reasoning to our experiences of causality and consciousness, it unpicks the mechanisms we use on a daily basis to help us predict, plan for and attempt to control the future. Future-Minded * Features a wealth of real world examples to help you engage with this fast-developing area * Provides clear analysis of psychological experiments and their findings to explain the evidence behind the theory Thought-provoking and highly topical, Future-Minded is fascinating reading for psychology students studying cognition or consciousness, and for anyone interested in understanding how we try to determine the future.

Presenting state-of-the-art work on the conscious and unconscious processes involved in emotion, this integrative volume brings together leading psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers. Carefully organized, tightly edited chapters address such compelling questions as how bodily responses contribute to conscious experience, whether "unconscious emotion" exists, how affect is transmitted from one person to another, and how emotional responses are produced in the brain. Bringing a new level of coherence to lines of inquiry that often remain disparate, the book identifies key, cross-cutting ideas and themes and sets forth a cogent agenda for future research.