The River of Consciousness

The River of Consciousness PDF Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385352573
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
From the best-selling author of Gratitude, On the Move, and Musicophilia, a collection of essays that displays Oliver Sacks's passionate engagement with the most compelling and seminal ideas of human endeavor: evolution, creativity, memory, time, consciousness, and experience. Oliver Sacks, a scientist and a storyteller, is beloved by readers for the extraordinary neurological case histories (Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars) in which he introduced and explored many now familiar disorders--autism, Tourette's syndrome, face blindness, savant syndrome. He was also a memoirist who wrote with honesty and humor about the remarkable and strange encounters and experiences that shaped him (Uncle Tungsten, On the Move, Gratitude). Sacks, an Oxford-educated polymath, had a deep familiarity not only with literature and medicine but with botany, animal anatomy, chemistry, the history of science, philosophy, and psychology. The River of Consciousness is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death, and it reveals his ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what makes us human.

The River of Consciousness

The River of Consciousness PDF Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385352573
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
From the best-selling author of Gratitude, On the Move, and Musicophilia, a collection of essays that displays Oliver Sacks's passionate engagement with the most compelling and seminal ideas of human endeavor: evolution, creativity, memory, time, consciousness, and experience. Oliver Sacks, a scientist and a storyteller, is beloved by readers for the extraordinary neurological case histories (Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars) in which he introduced and explored many now familiar disorders--autism, Tourette's syndrome, face blindness, savant syndrome. He was also a memoirist who wrote with honesty and humor about the remarkable and strange encounters and experiences that shaped him (Uncle Tungsten, On the Move, Gratitude). Sacks, an Oxford-educated polymath, had a deep familiarity not only with literature and medicine but with botany, animal anatomy, chemistry, the history of science, philosophy, and psychology. The River of Consciousness is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death, and it reveals his ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what makes us human.

The River of Consciousness

The River of Consciousness PDF Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1447264037
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Two weeks before his death, Oliver Sacks outlined the contents of The River of Consciousness, the last book he would oversee . . . The bestselling author of On the Move, Musicophilia, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks is known for his illuminating case histories about people living with neurological conditions at the far borderlands of human experience. But his grasp of science was not restricted to neuroscience or medicine; he was fascinated by the issues, ideas, and questions of all the sciences. That wide-ranging expertise and passion informs the perspective of this book, in which he interrogates the nature not only of human experience but of all life. In The River of Consciousness, Dr. Sacks takes on evolution, botany, chemistry, medicine, neuroscience, and the arts, and calls upon his great scientific and creative heroes – above all, Darwin, Freud, and William James. For Sacks, these thinkers were constant companions from an early age; the questions they explored – the meaning of evolution, the roots of creativity, and the nature of consciousness – lie at the heart of science and of this book. The River of Consciousness demonstrates Sacks’s unparalleled ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless endeavor to understand what makes us human.

The River of Consciousness

The River of Consciousness PDF Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Knopf Canada
ISBN: 0345809017
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
A profoundly fascinating, illuminating major work from the beloved, bestselling thinker and neurologist Oliver Sacks--completed by him just before his death--provides readers with a compelling, rare gift from the master. The River of Consciousness reflects Oliver Sacks at his wisest and most humane, as he examines some of the human animal's most remarkable faculties: memory, creativity, consciousness, and our present, ongoing evolution. Before his death, Sacks personally collected into this one volume his recent essays and case studies, never before published in book form, which he felt best displayed his passionate engagement with his most compelling and seminal ideas. The book, lucid and accessible as ever, is a mirror of his own consciousness, discovering in his personal and humane interactions with others, unique insight, and fresh meaning. Featuring a preface written two weeks before his death, The River of Consciousness reveals the beloved, bestselling author's unique ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what it is that makes us human.

Streams of Consciousness

Streams of Consciousness PDF Author: Jeff Hull
Publisher: Globe Pequot
ISBN: 9781592289882
Category : Fishing stories
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The next great voice in the Lyons Press pantheon of immortal fishing writers.

Everything in Its Place

Everything in Its Place PDF Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0451492900
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
From the best-selling author of Gratitude and On the Move, a final volume of essays that showcase Sacks's broad range of interests--from his passion for ferns, swimming, and horsetails, to his final case histories exploring schizophrenia, dementia, and Alzheimer's. Oliver Sacks, scientist and storyteller, is beloved by readers for his neurological case histories and his fascination and familiarity with human behavior at its most unexpected and unfamiliar. Everything in Its Place is a celebration of Sacks's myriad interests, told with his characteristic compassion and erudition, and in his luminous prose.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind PDF Author: Julian Jaynes
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547527543
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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Book Description
National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

The Mind's Eye

The Mind's Eye PDF Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307594556
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
In The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the power of speech, the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the ability to read, the sense of sight. For all of these people, the challenge is to adapt to a radically new way of being in the world. There is Lilian, a concert pianist who becomes unable to read music and is eventually unable even to recognize everyday objects, and Sue, a neurobiologist who has never seen in three dimensions, until she suddenly acquires stereoscopic vision in her fifties. There is Pat, who reinvents herself as a loving grandmother and active member of her community, despite the fact that she has aphasia and cannot utter a sentence, and Howard, a prolific novelist who must find a way to continue his life as a writer even after a stroke destroys his ability to read. And there is Dr. Sacks himself, who tells the story of his own eye cancer and the bizarre and disconcerting effects of losing vision to one side. Sacks explores some very strange paradoxes—people who can see perfectly well but cannot recognize their own children, and blind people who become hyper-visual or who navigate by “tongue vision.” He also considers more fundamental questions: How do we see? How do we think? How important is internal imagery—or vision, for that matter? Why is it that, although writing is only five thousand years old, humans have a universal, seemingly innate, potential for reading? The Mind’s Eye is a testament to the complexity of vision and the brain and to the power of creativity and adaptation. And it provides a whole new perspective on the power of language and communication, as we try to imagine what it is to see with another person’s eyes, or another person’s mind.

Human and Machine Consciousness

Human and Machine Consciousness PDF Author: David Gamez
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1783743018
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Consciousness is widely perceived as one of the most fundamental, interesting and difficult problems of our time. However, we still know next to nothing about the relationship between consciousness and the brain and we can only speculate about the consciousness of animals and machines. Human and Machine Consciousness presents a new foundation for the scientific study of consciousness. It sets out a bold interpretation of consciousness that neutralizes the philosophical problems and explains how we can make scientific predictions about the consciousness of animals, brain-damaged patients and machines. Gamez interprets the scientific study of consciousness as a search for mathematical theories that map between measurements of consciousness and measurements of the physical world. We can use artificial intelligence to discover these theories and they could make accurate predictions about the consciousness of humans, animals and artificial systems. Human and Machine Consciousness also provides original insights into unusual conscious experiences, such as hallucinations, religious experiences and out-of-body states, and demonstrates how ‘designer’ states of consciousness could be created in the future. Gamez explains difficult concepts in a clear way that closely engages with scientific research. His punchy, concise prose is packed with vivid examples, making it suitable for the educated general reader as well as philosophers and scientists. Problems are brought to life in colourful illustrations and a helpful summary is given at the end of each chapter. The endnotes provide detailed discussions of individual points and full references to the scientific and philosophical literature.

The Body's Map of Consciousness, Volume 1: Movement

The Body's Map of Consciousness, Volume 1: Movement PDF Author: Lansing Barrett Gresham
Publisher: Integrated Awareness
ISBN: 9781893969018
Category : Mind and body therapies
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description


The Science of Consciousness

The Science of Consciousness PDF Author: Eva Deli
Publisher: Nadir-Video
ISBN: 9789631226263
Category : Consciousness
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
According to ancient traditions there is an organic unity of existence. Yet science have shown our world as mechanical and highly disconnected until now. Through a synthesis of the most recent scientific research in theoretical physics, evolution and cognition, Eva Deli formulates an organically unified cosmos: particles of matter, the mind and the whole cosmos fit together as Russian dolls. In this coherent and intuitive world view to understand particles is to understand the mind, and it is to understand the universe. Material interaction is the source of a cosmological evolution that increases complexity and culminates in the emergence of the intelligent mind. Characteristics of elementary particles can be recognized in conscious processes. For example, human decision making can be best described by quantum probability, allowing quantum theory to be used for search-engine optimization. The context of judgments and decisions corresponds to quantum interference of elementary matter particles. The mind also forms a unified experience in spite of the cacophony of ideas and sensory stimuli it receives from the environment. These and other similar findings characterize a mental elementary particle, which interacts by elementary forces: called emotions. Emotions are the emotional equivalents of gravity, electromagnetism, the nuclear weak and strong forces. For the first time, the scientific classification of emotions becomes possible. The indivisible, self-contained, and self-regulating universe also shows elementary particle characteristics. Thus, the material, mental elementary particles and the universe have identical energy structures and analogue operational principles. and together form a fractal structure of vastly different energy levels and sizes: the organically interconnected, complex universe. The hypothesis' fresh approach has the potential to ameliorate and mend the existing schism between religion and the sciences, and its main tenets can be verified by technically feasible experiments. The recognition that material particles, the mind and the universe are analogue quantum systems, a radically new physical world view emerges, which if proven correct, can point toward potential applications in physics and medicine. The hypothesis can explain many currently unexplained phenomena in physics, evolution, neurology and the social sciences. For example the hypothesis defines time, it redefines entropy and it introduces a hypothesis for gravity. Its new vision for evolution and emotions has implications for social sciences and even economy. Videos posted on the Author's page facilitate understanding some key concepts.