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Book ReviewOriginally published in The British Journal of Healthcare Computing & Information Management. |
John McCrone (1999). Going Inside: A Tour Round a Single Moment of Consciousness. Faber and Faber: London.
Christmas is looming, along with various states of consciousness brought on by the panic of last-minute presents, overindulgence in alcohol, and tepid sitcoms. This book will not tell you how to improve your planning but it will provide an enlightening and fascinating analysis of how consciousness, in its different forms, may emerge. The issue is of great importance to academics from many disciplines because there is not yet a convincing explanation for transcending the gap between the brain's physical and phenomenological properties. Some of the dichotomies inherent in the problem are clearly detailed by McCrone. How does the intrinsically analogue and fuzzy neuronal activity translate into clear, crisp responses? How can such a noisy system based on multiple, error-strewn, feedback loops result in a stable view of the world? He argues strongly that the answers are to be found in dynamic properties of the brain rather than by using the reductionist approach often favoured by computer scientists.The book ranges across chaos and complexity, the hierarchical and co-operative nature of brain structures, experimental techniques for measuring brain activities, and key empirical results. Some ticklish paradoxes are exposed. For example, if it takes about half a second for us to become consciously aware of an event, how come people can play tennis when balls served at 100 mph arrive in less than this time? It all comes down to anticipation: consciousness rises out of a sea of subconscious expectations, where one makes small adjustments to predictions rather than recreating the world from scratch every half a second. If this has not whetted your appetite, there is always Boxing Day and another repeated sitcom.