Sublime

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Some elegant research into gesture and speech reveals that thought begins and ends in the right hemisphere, passing through the necessary staging post of the left hemisphere, where it is put into serial sentences. This follows a typical pattern in the way the hemispheres relate: the origins and the end lie in the right hemisphere's world, but it is

English Victorian version of a Renaissance man, Francis Galton. Galton wore many hats. He was an anthropologist, tropical explorer (Southwest Africa), geographer, sociologist, geneticist, statistician, inventor, meteorologist, and was also considered the father of psychometry,

Contemporary neuroscience identifies a particular part of the brain, sometimes called “the interpreter,” as the source of the familiar internal narrative that gives us our sense of self. Two prominent neuroscientists have recently characterized the quirky, undependable quality of the tale told by the interpreter. Antonio Damasio describes it this

La cuestión fundamental planteada por los psicólogos de la Gestalt era precisamente aquello que los conductistas habían decidido ignorar: ¿cómo crea significados el cerebro?

These observations refute the myth that consciousness simply arises from neurons doing their thing. Here are billions of cerebellar cells doing what comes naturally to them, firing action potentials and releasing little squirts of neurotransmitter, yet without any feelings. What matters is not the constitution of brain tissue but the way it is

I believe that this mysterious programmer of the brain is the true locus of human consciousness. In other words, consciousness is the creator of our brain activity, not the other way around.

I am suggesting that the brain has all kinds of local consciousness systems, a constellation of them, which are enabling consciousness. Although the feelings of consciousness appear to be unified to you, they are given form by these vastly separate systems. Whichever notion you happened to be conscious of at a particular moment is the one that

In general terms, Jaynes suggested that human consciousness is ‘bicameral’. By this he meant that the two hemispheres of the brain work independently of each other. In effect this means that inner thoughts would have been sensed as verbal instructions by our distant ancestors. They heard the gods speaking to them. Jaynes believed that the source of