The Conscious Brain (dedikált példány) [antikvár]

Preface When, in my final undergraduate year of biochemistry, I had to come to terms with what I proposed to do next, assuming I was going on to do research, I had few doubts. If it was to be research, there was one biological problem above all else which concerned me - the workings of the brain and their relationship to mind and consciousness. There were, and still are, several reasons for this obsession. One, more personal than others, is simply the fascination of self-knowledge. A second is the challenge represented by the fact that the interpretation of brain mechanisms represents one of the last remaining biological mysteries, the last refuge of shadowy mysticism and dubious religious philosophy, the residue of all the 'emergent properties' with which biology was once filled. Of more general significance is the fact that we live in a society in which the conditions of existence are such as to produce a continued mismatch between the potential of human performance for the vast majority of mankind and the actuality of their existence. Changing these conditions of existence demands action at the social and political level. But to an analysis of the appropriate direction of change, the study of the workings - and malfunctioning - of the human brain has something to contribute. If human history is the saga of humans becoming, then at the individual level it is also the history of their brains becoming. This leads to a concern not merely with the problems of what -misleadingly I believe - is known as mental illness, but even more to an examination of just what are the factors, in the individual and society, that determine both the differences and the similarities in performance of individual human brains. How do genetic, environmental and evolutionary factors influence the brain structure, beliefs and behaviour of the individual? Such an examination is intimately bound up, too, with the 15