Sublime

“We’re not machines. Our brain and our mind are fundamentally distinct, though they work together. The brain offers a third-person perspective; it’s the mind that provides a first-person experience.”

The idea of a Gestalt is central to this book: by it I mean the form of a whole that cannot be reduced to parts without the loss of something essential to its nature. Indeed, what I hope to offer in this book is just such a Gestalt – one that is based on an understanding of the import of the structure of our brains.

asymmetry of the nervous system has been universally conserved as a means of addressing the problem of how to ‘get’ without being ‘got’.

achieving it, a machine that approximates, however well, the human mind yet has no consciousness, a Frankenstein's monster of body parts that never truly lives.

minds and limber

it is not what is done, but how it is done, that distinguishes the two hemispheres,

The MRI revealed that the control subject drew portraits using the right posterior parietal area, the brain’s facial-recognition module, with which we recognise people and judge their mood. Ocean was also drawing faces but, that part of his brain was quiet. Instead, the blood rushed to the right middle frontal area, associated with spatial awarenes