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The Ravenous Brain - How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R287
Discovery Miles 2 870
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The Ravenous Brain - How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning (Hardcover)
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List price R359
Loot Price R287
Discovery Miles 2 870
You Save R72 (20%)
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Consciousness is our gateway to experience: it enables us to
recognize Van Gogh's starry skies, be enraptured by Beethoven's
Fifth, and stand in awe of a snowcapped mountain. Yet consciousness
is subjective, personal, and famously difficult to examine:
philosophers have for centuries declared this mental entity so
mysterious as to be impenetrable to science. In The Ravenous Brain
, neuroscientist Daniel Bor departs sharply from this historical
view, and builds on the latest research to propose a new model for
how consciousness works. Bor argues that this brain-based faculty
evolved as an accelerated knowledge gathering tool. Consciousness
is effectively an idea factory- that choice mental space dedicated
to innovation, a key component of which is the discovery of deep
structures within the contents of our awareness. This model
explains our brains' ravenous appetite for information- and in
particular, its constant search for patterns. Why, for instance,
after all our physical needs have been met, do we recreationally
solve crossword or Sudoku puzzles? Such behaviour may appear
biologically wasteful, but, according to Bor, this search for
structure can yield immense evolutionary benefits- it led our
ancestors to discover fire and farming, pushed modern society to
forge ahead in science and technology, and guides each one of us to
understand and control the world around us. But the sheer
innovative power of human consciousness carries with it the heavy
cost of mental fragility. Bor discusses the medical implications of
his theory of consciousness, and what it means for the origins and
treatment of psychiatric ailments, including attention-deficit
disorder, schizophrenia, manic depression, and autism. All mental
illnesses, he argues, can be reformulated as disorders of
consciousness- a perspective that opens up new avenues of treatment
for alleviating mental suffering. A controversial view of
consciousness, The Ravenous Brain links cognition to creativity in
an ingenious solution to one of science's biggest mysteries.
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