A BOOK OF THE YEAR GUARDIAN, THE ECONOMIST, NEW STATESMAN, FINANCIAL TIMES, BLOOMBERG Anil Seth's radical new theory of consciousness challenges our understanding of perception and reality, doing for brain science what Dawkins did for evolutionary biology. 'A brilliant beast of a book.' DAVID BYRNE 'Hugely important.' JIM AL-KHALILI 'Masterly . . . An exhilarating book: a vast-ranging, phenomenal achievement that will undoubtedly become a seminal text.' GAIA VINCE, GUARDIAN Being You is not as simple as it sounds. Somehow, within each of our brains, billions of neurons work to create our conscious experience. How does this happen? Why do we experience life in the first person? After over twenty years researching the brain, world-renowned neuroscientist Anil Seth puts forward a radical new theory of consciousness and self. His unique theory of what it means to 'be you' challenges our understanding of perception and reality and it turns what you thought you knew about yourself on its head. 'Seth thinks clearly and sharply on one of the hardest problems of science and philosophy, cutting through weeds with a scientist's mind and a storyteller's skill.' ADAM RUTHERFORD 'A page-turner and a mind-blower . . . Beautifully written, crystal clear, deeply insightful.' DAVID EAGLEMAN 'If you read one book about conciousness, it must be Seth's. JULIAN BAGGINI, WALL STREET JOURNAL 'Amazing.' RUSSELL BRAND 'Gripping.' ALEX GARLAND 'I loved it.' MICHAEL POLLAN 'Fascinating.' FINANCIAL TIMES 'Awe-inspring.' NEW STATESMAN 'Brilliant.' CLAIRE TOMALIN, NEW YORK TIMES

How do conscious experience, subjectivity, and free will arise from the brain and the body? Even in the late 20th century, consciousness was considered to be beyond the reach of science. Now, understanding the neural mechanisms underlying consciousness is recognized as a key objective for 21st century science. The cognitive neuroscience of consciousness is a fundamentally multidisciplinary enterprise, involving powerful new combinations of functional brain imaging, computational modelling, theoretical innovation, and basic neurobiology. Its progress will be marked by new insights not only into the complex brain mechanisms underlying consciousness, but also by novel clinical approaches to a wide range of neurological and psychiatric disorders. These innovations are well represented by the contents of the present volume. A target article by Victor Lamme puts forward the contentious position that neural evidence should trump evidence from behaviour and introspection, in any theory of consciousness. This article and its several commentaries advance one of the fundamental debates in consciousness science, namely whether there exists non-reportable phenomenal consciousness, perhaps dependent on local rather than global neural processes. Other articles explore the wider terrain of the new science of consciousness. For example, Maniscalco and colleagues use theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation to selectively impair metacognitive awareness; Massimini and coworkers examine changes in functional connectivity during anesthesi, and Vanhaudenhuyse et al describe innovations in detecting residual awareness following traumatic brain injury. Together, then contents of this volume exemplify the `grand challenge of consciousness' in combining transformative questions about the human condition with a tractable programme of experimental and theoretical research.

How do conscious experience, subjectivity, and free will arise from the brain and the body? Even in the late 20th century, consciousness was considered to be beyond the reach of science. Now, understanding the neural mechanisms underlying consciousness is recognized as a key objective for 21st century science. The cognitive neuroscience of consciousness is a fundamentally multidisciplinary enterprise, involving powerful new combinations of functional brain imaging, computational modelling, theoretical innovation, and basic neurobiology. Its progress will be marked by new insights not only into the complex brain mechanisms underlying consciousness, but also by novel clinical approaches to a wide range of neurological and psychiatric disorders. These innovations are well represented by the contents of the present volume. A target article by Victor Lamme puts forward the contentious position that neural evidence should trump evidence from behaviour and introspection, in any theory of consciousness. This article and its several commentaries advance one of the fundamental debates in consciousness science, namely whether there exists non-reportable phenomenal consciousness, perhaps dependent on local rather than global neural processes. Other articles explore the wider terrain of the new science of consciousness. For example, Maniscalco and colleagues use theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation to selectively impair metacognitive awareness; Massimini and coworkers examine changes in functional connectivity during anesthesi, and Vanhaudenhuyse et al describe innovations in detecting residual awareness following traumatic brain injury. Together, then contents of this volume exemplify the `grand challenge of consciousness' in combining transformative questions about the human condition with a tractable programme of experimental and theoretical research.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science, FST TCS 2002, held in Kanpur, India in December 2002.The 26 revised full papers presented together with 5 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 108 submissions. A broad variety of topics from the theory of computing are addressed, from algorithmics and discrete mathematics as well as from logics and programming theory.