Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul

by Francis Crick

Traditionally, the human soul is regarded as a nonphysical concept that can only be examined by psychiatrists and theologists. In his new book, The Astonishing Hypothesis, Nobel Laureate Francis Crick boldly straddles the line between science and spirituality by examining the soul from the standpoint of a modern scientist, basing the soul's existence and function on an in-depth examination of how the human brain "sees."

Genres: Science, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Psychology, Nonfiction, Biology, Brain

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Francis Harry Compton Crick OM FRS (8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004), was a British molecular biologist, physicist, and neuroscientist, and most noted for being one of the co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. He, James D. Watson and Maurice Wilkins were jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material" .

Crick is widely known for use of the term "central dogma" to summarize an idea that genetic information flow in cells is essentially one-way, from DNA to RNA to protein. Crick was an important theoretical molecular biologist and played an important role in research related to revealing the genetic code.

During the remainder of his career, he held the post of J.W. Kieckhefer Distinguished Research Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. His later research centered on theoretical neurobiology and attempts to advance the scientific study of human consciousness. He remained in this post until his death; "he was editing a manuscript on his death bed, a scientist until the bitter end" said Christof Koch.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_...

Reviews

[Ivan Vuković · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was awfully difficult to read it, not because the language or terminology was difficult (it wasn't), not even because it was a hard concept to wrap your mind around. It was difficult for me because I was waiting for the parts about consciousness and awareness, but Crick filled pages and pages with tedious details about the visual system.

As someone interested in neuroscience, that was quite boring and exhausting because I know all that, I wanted to read something about consciousness, something about the "scientific search for the 'soul'", something "astonishing". Instead, at times I would find myself wondering whether I was actually reading a dry neuroscience textbook.

In short, I give it 3 stars because I think it could have been written in a much more concrete, interesting and concise manner, instead of wasting so many pages on explaining the visual system.

However, the reason I did not give it 2 stars is because there were some parts I quite enjoyed, such as parts of the introductory and final chapters.

If you want to learn about the visual system, I guess you could give this book a try, it explains it well, but if you're interested in consciousness, I wouldn't recommend making this a priority read.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've reached the point now where I've read so many popular science books about the consciousness and cognition that I'm starting to see a lot of redundancy. Crick's astonishing hypothesis was anything but to me at this point. Crick uses a very effective, and very standard, method to drive his point home. He goes over neuronal firing, and then details the workings of the visual system. We know so much about this system that Crick is able to relay to the reader that vast quantities of neurons, firing in parallel, are what create a sense of consciousness in humans. The book is fantastic, but I gave it a four out of charity. If you've read Dennett and the Churchlands and maybe some Pinker or Ramachandran, you will get nothing new out of this book. If you've never really read anything like this, and you are interested in neuroscience and consciousness, read this, you'll love it.

Since I dn't really have all that much to say about the book, I thought I'd talk about something that bugged me early on:

Pg. 110 – the animal rights movement is surely correct in insisting that animals be treated humanely, and as a result of their efforts animals in laboratories are now looked after somewhat better than they were in the past. But is is sentimental to idealize animals. The life of an animal in the wild, whether carnivore or herbivore, is often brutal and short compared to its life in captivity. Nor is it reasonable to claim that since both animals and humans are “part of Nature” that they should be entitled to exactly equal treatment…The should certainly be handled humanely, but it shows a distorted sense of values to put them on the same level as humans.

I guess this paragraph just served as a reminder that as brilliant as Crick was, he's a scientist, not a philosopher. He was a biologist and neuroscientist and he thought about DNA and the brain and lots of really awesome stuff, but maybe not so much about ethics. Not to say he was unethical, but that quote above reveals quite a few logical flaws.

He certainly makes a valid point, assuming that's the one he was making, that it isn't a clear cut case of "testing on animals is bad". Yes, animals in the wild have it rough. Nature is brutal. And while there are certainly animal rights activists who might argue we are giving them worse lives than they would have had in the wild, that is really besides the point. The issue isn't about comparing their lives to one without interference. The issue is whether we have a right, or at least a very good reason, to do harm to sentient life (a point which can certainly be argued, but lets agree that animals can feel pain) that doesn't make a free choice to put itself in that situation.

This is not a black and white question, and it doesn't have an easy answer. I imagine a comprehensive look at this issue would involve really determining what the animal experiences and what the tests involve, and what the possible benefits of the research are. It's a mistake to say that all animal research is wrong. It's just as much of a mistake to say that all scientific research is worth while, and that anything done in the pursuit of the research is acceptable. Crick completely misses the point of this issue. And what's more, his last line about it being a distorted sense of values to treat animals equally can't just be stated as fact. If it really is a mistake to view animal rights as equal to ours, at least state why.

But don't let this little diatribe dissuade you, the book is excellent otherwise!

[Dennis Littrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

He means the soul as "the ghost in the machine"

The "astonishing hypothesis" of the title is simply that we are "no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." (He really needs to add "...developing and interacting with the environment," since part of what we are can only be understood as emergent properties of our structure over time.) What he does add is that "to most people" this is "a really surprising concept." I think Crick is a little out of touch because it's not surprising to me or to any number of people I know. His view, along with my addendum, is generally considered the standard "no ghost in the machine" view of consciousness.

Consciousness, then, is what this book is really about. The "soul" in the title is meant tongue in cheek, or ironically since the idea of a soul is not amenable to scientific inquiry. Crick thinks that the best way to understand consciousness is first to understand, at the cellular/chemical level, how the brain works. He proposes to make an attack on this (he likes the military metaphor) through a study of how the brain "sees." Consequently he presents a number of optical illusions, some of which I hadn't seen before. He believes it is "hopeless to try to solve the problems of consciousness by general philosophical arguments..." (p. 19). He uses the terms "awareness" and "consciousness" "more or less interchangeably" (p. 10) which I think is good since it takes the aura of awe off the pumpkin, so to speak. Crick is not a dualist who believes there is a "mind" independent of the neurons.

Of course, from my point of view there is indeed a "mind" independent of the nerve cells; this "mind" however is an abstract construct consisting of thoughts, ideas, experiences, however vaguely and inaccurately recalled, hopes and dreams, etc. It exists "nowhere" and of course everywhere. It exists before time and after time. It is not matter or energy but information written not on the wind nor on the ether, but on the vacuum of time and space. It cannot be accessed by anyone, although I personally can access some of my own mind, again however incompletely. I like to think of this "mind" as the rationalist's soul It is information, period.

Now it may be that there is an intelligence or intelligences elsewhere in the universe with the power to access such information and to reconstruct it in some sense, perhaps able even to reconstruct the matter and energy that developed it! However this is just the sort of fanciful speculation that Crick wants to get away from.

Even before he wrote this not very readable and somewhat opaque book, there have appeared a number of excellent books on consciousness discussing what Crick thinks is the astonishing hypothesis, especially books that see consciousness as a sort of illusion developed by the evolutionary mechanism. Two very readable ones are David Darling's Zen Physics (1996) and Tor Norretranders' The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (1991;1998).

Incidentally, this is the same Francis Crick, who in the early fifties, along with James D. Watson, discovered the double helix structure of the DNA molecule thereby winning a Nobel Prize and achieving fame and fortune. Watson's controversial memoir about their discovery, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, is one of the most readable scientific detective stories ever written. Crick is also a prime proponent of the panspermia hypothesis about the origin of life on earth.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “Understanding Evolution and Ourselves”

[Michael Huang · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book doesn't address the question of soul in any significant way at all. It didn't even have a complete theory of visual consciousness, it's more like a call to arms to ask people to address the question. So if you want an answer because of the title, you are in for a disappointment. That said, the book has some very good summary of a lot of neural science findings that may be very valuable to you (I liked it a lot).

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a neuroscientist, most of the book was fairly basic material I already knew, but the conclusions were interesting. If you aren't a neuroscientist and you're interested in the basics, particularly of the visual system, then I highly recommend it. It will help you to understand my thesis :-)

[Ahmad · Rating 3 out of 5]

1) Uses vision as model — well-mapped, similar in primates and humans.
2) Not all visual processing reaches awareness: so what are the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs)?

3) Brain reconstructs reality — part external input, part internal inference.
Which neural mechanisms are necessary and which are sufficient for conscious experience?

4) Most brain functions run without consciousness.
5) The binding problem: how brain combines color, shape, motion into unified percept.
Different features processed separately → yet experienced as single object.
6) Suggests synchrony binds features.


7) V1 = active in unconscious vision, essential for input but not enough for awareness.
Blindsight = patient responds to unseen stimulus (avoid obstacles that they don’t ”see“!!)→ proves V1 ≠ conscious vision.

8) Higher areas (V4, MT, IT) track what is consciously perceived.

9) Gamma synchrony (~40 Hz) binds feature-specific activity.
10) Feedback loops and reentry stabilize percepts.

11) Experiments:
• Binocular rivalry → stimulus constant, percept changes → gamma shifts with percept.
• Masking, blindsight → show unconscious processing.
• Neural recordings → firing patterns match reported perception.

12) Reports (e.g., button press) correlate with gamma shifts in relevant areas.
13) Thalamus (esp. pulvinar) may coordinate cortical synchrony.

14) Concludes: synchrony + reentry + distributed processing form NCCs.

15) Doesn’t solve consciousness, but frames it biologically, enables testing.

[Remo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Francis Crick, que recibió un Nobel en el 62 por su descubrimiento de la estructura del ADN, se mete aquí a intentar explicar la conciencia desde un punto de vista físico y biológico. Por supuesto no llega a conseguirlo, pero el viaje es fantástico. El autor dedica gran parte del libro al sistema visual y su funcionamiento, lo cual puede deseperarnos si solo vamos buscando la parte de la conciencia ( a mí me encantó; se aprende mucho). Uno de los descubrimientos a los que da gran importancia es el de los iones de calcio como explicación de la memoria a largo plazo, que cuenta muy bien.
Al final la parte de la conciencia la deja en hipótesis, la conciencia es el disparo simultáneo de muchas neuronas, pero no queda nada resuelto. Me encantó este libro porque da una idea de como enfocar científicamente un problema aparentemente intratable como es la conciencia.

[Ali · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanna just say, Francis Crick was a really good scientist, who made big works in biology; but, as an author, I'm not a big fan of his works, actually! His books are so boring, which contains pure science, without much astonishing context (unlike the name of his book!).

[Yoosef esmaeeli]

کتابی بسیار زیبا در زمینه مغز انسان و بحث آگاهی است واقعا از خوندن هرصفحه کتاب لذت بردم

[Anagh · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading Christof Koch’s book, it was natural for me to pick up Crick’s book on the same topic.
Of his mentor, Koch had the following to say:
“They used to say that in his prime, Arnold Schwarzenegger had muscles in places where people didn’t have places. Crick was to scientific creativity what Arnold was to body building.”

The astonishing hypothesis is a strong affirmation of the (now) long held belief that minds follow from brains. As for consciousness itself, the assertion is straightforward - there's a bunch of facts about the external world that we are consciously aware of. On the other hand experimental data shows a breathtaking amount of brain activity that passes beneath the hood of conscious experience. How are the two different in terms of their neural correlates?

The book is a feverish array of ideas and possible lines of attack. Crick tackles visual awareness as a starting point to explore the various facets of consciousness(parrying philosophical conundrums right off the bat).
Crick presents several possible models for consciousness. Most famous of these is the Global Workspace(GW) model proposed by Bernie Baars which posits the existence of very short term memory. This memory acts like an attentional searchlight, throwing light on a subset of brain processes that are momentarily rendered conscious. The conscious process in its stead can broadcast a particular narrative of the world to other unconscious processes in order to perform a coherent voluntary function. This is much like the workings of a modern democracy where competing groups(lobbies) vie for control of power. Powerful coalitions keep forming and dissolving, each stamping its will on the collective. We are given to believe that these theories are testable, but thumping validation is still elusive(more recent theories like Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory have a slightly different take on things).

Homo Sapiens, being a largely visually driven species, has a very intricate visual apparatus . Broadly speaking, after the initial acquisition from the retina, information gets handled between layers of subsequent processing units. Its like a game of twenty questions, where each layer asks questions about the input until it arrives at a decision as to the state of the visual landscape. These units are highly overlapping, with rich back connections. A map of the various visual hierarchies looks like a veritable zoo of connections and back connections. At the very top is the so called archicortex(Hippocampus).
Not surprisingly, most experimental progress in understanding vision has taken place at the far ends of the visual map(Hubel and Wiesel's pioneering experiments on the cat V1 and more recent elucidation of rodent spatial navigation system in the entorhinal cortex). The intervening layers are largely unexplored partly due to the messy ways in which evolutionary tinkering works. Anyone who has ever trained a neural net would tell you that ascribing particular feature detection capabilities to specific neurons is erroneous as individual nodes often encode very complex representations. How this messy wiring(laid down by evolution) causes conscious percept is the million dollar question.

Much of our knowledge about the cortex derives from either invasive experiments on non-human primates or non-invasive experiments(except for a few cases where electrodes may be directly implanted for diagnostic purposes) with human subjects. The former approach allows for recording from single units whereas in human subjects researchers have to be content with signals received from potentially billions of neurons(limiting spatial and temporal resolutions in the process). While animals allow greater observational resolution, human subjects can provide linguistic feedback. Another source of information comes from studies on the pathological human brain. Experiments on blindsight(certain lower level visual computations may be preserved in patients with cortical blindness that don't ordinarily cause awareness) and split brains provide unique insights into the nature of consciousness. The book is a treasure trove of foundational(albeit a tad dated)experiments.

Despite the intimidating nature of the problem, there doesn’t appear to be a poverty of ideas. Crick is characteristically boisterous and pounds the reader with a feverish volley of ideas. Its almost as if he was thinking aloud in the process of writing the book. The bibliography and glossary at the end are well written, making the book a good read for amateurs and professionals alike. The book is sure to take its place as a canon in the field of consciousness research(if it hasn’t already).

[Panos · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I read this book, more than 10 years ago, I felt "astonished" with the Crick's angle of attack on the subject. It is provoking, scientific and impartial, and this last characteristic is even more difficult to achieve, considering that Crick tilts heavily towards atheism. However Crick is a scientist, and science should be impartial to the facts collected, observations made, in order to propose a hypothesis or prove theorems.

I believe that the subtitle is misleading, and I think that even Crick mentions it somewhere in the book: Crick does not try to prove that there is no soul or God or anything which we may refer to as metaphysical. He is beyond that as he admits that he cannot study something that is not observable through a scientific approach.

What he sets out to show is that we have the tools to plan our research towards establishing one of the most crucial questions regarding the soul: if we add up all our biological functions, is the sum capable of explaining in a scientific way our personality, our interaction with the world, our conscience of what is "reality"? Or is there something lacking, something which we could very well call soul?

Crick does not provide answers; he explains to us what we have achieved so far in the research of the brain functions, our ideas on how we should proceed, along with what he believes are the best avenues to follow in order to reach some answers on the issue at hand.

Should Crick's hypothesis be proven, this would not mean that the non-existence of God would be proven as well. This would be only similar to the logical errors our "religious fathers" seem so easy to pronounce and defend. What Crick hypothesis would achieve, if proven, is that our personality and the basic understanding of our own selves is the product of a highly complex biological instrument, our brain, and nothing else. Isn't that thought provoking?

[Dan DalMonte · Rating 1 out of 5]

Francis Crick does neuroscience. He studies vision and how the mind interprets visual data. He studies information systems and how neurons interact. Crick is completely illiterate when it comes to philosophy, and never proves the thesis which he claims is the center of his book, which is an identity theory between mind and brain he refers to as the Astonishing Hypothesis. He seems to think that consciousness is the brain and its empirically observable physical content. But, it requires philosophy to prove this. Crick goes on and on describing how neurons work and giving us complex diagrams of different parts of the brain. But none of this empirical data collection addresses the philosophical question of the mind-brain relationship. No one denies that neuroscience is real and that we can use tools to study the human brain. The question is the relationship between this neuroscience and consciousness. Finding that there are certain neuroscientific tendencies having to do with the physical matter of the brain does not mean that consciousness is identifiable with this physical matter.

[Κατερίνα Μάγνη · Rating 5 out of 5]

Το βιβλίο είναι εξαιρετικά καλογραμμένο και έντιμο. Ο Crick παραδέχεται ότι δεν δίνει οριστική απάντηση, αλλά υποστηρίζει ότι η κατεύθυνση που θα πρέπει να ακολουθηθεί για την προσέγγιση της απάντησης είναι η ενδελεχής επιστημονική έρευνα.
https://anagnoseisvivlion.wordpress.c...

[Tom Hunter · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was published in 1994. Though Crick is an excellent, concise writer, his information is out of date (obviously). Yet, there really was no great insight here and I wondered why it was necessary for him to write this work. If you have no other book on the brain available, I would recommend this as a good entry point. Otherwise, this is an orphaned resource. Don't bother.

[Ronald Yu · Rating 1 out of 5]

This guy parrots basic results of cognitive science and acts like hes introduced some groundbreaking theory on the human soul. I learned nothing

[N · Rating 3 out of 5]

Notes
3 memories, episodic (remember event), categorical (definition of word/concept), procedural (ride a bike).

Flash 3 rows of 4 letters each. Can recall 4-5. Turn off flash and ask to repeat only one of the rows. Can recall 3. Why not 3*3=9 rather than 4-5? Because rapidly decaying very short term ‘iconic’ memory.

When not excited, neurons still send a low background spike of 1-5 Hertz so they are on alert and ready to fire when excited (100-500 hertz).

Unlike electricity in wire (current carried by cloud of electrons), electric effect in neuron is ions moving in or out of axon through protein gates, changing the potential. This change of potential is propagated down the axon.

Speed of neuronal pulse is 1/3rd speed of sound. Electrical (spike) -> chemical (vesicles released into synaptic cleft) -> electrical (vesicles change potential of target neuron)

3 ion channels, 1 to voltage, 1 to a neurotransmitter, 1 that is NMDA sensitive to both voltage and glutamate (main excitatory transmittor molecule).

NMDA opens if presynaptic axon releases glutamate) and postsynaptic voltage is altered - allowing passage of Na, K, Ca. Net result is change in strength of synapse for days, weeks, longer.

Inhibitory is GABA, released by a fifth of all neurons in neocortex. Since synaptic transmission is mostly chemical, small tailored molecules (LSD) can interferely greatly.

Benzodiazepines (sleepers, Valium) bind with GABA receptor and make GABA effects greater.

Neuron only tells another neuron how excited it is. Can fire once or in bursts. Depends on its previous activation, on signal received, as well as general neuronal activity in the area, thus a simple neuron becomes too complex to analyze.

‘Binding problem’ of taking various neuronal firings and form a coherent picture, likely based on the oscillation frequency patterns of different groups of firings.

[Ali m · Rating 1 out of 5]

کتاب در یک جمله می‌خواهد بگوید هیچ چیز ماورایی وجود ندارد، انسان ماورای جسم هیچ حقیقتی ندارد و آنچه گمان می‌شده که روح باشد چیزی جز فعل و انفعالات مغز نیست!
این حرف مفت را که نویسنده‌ی برنده‌ی جایزه‌ی نوبل به متوفا در سال 1994 میلادی زده، امروزه با همان ملاک‌های به اصلاح علمی بطلانش اثبات شده، به عنوان قطره از دریا، در مقاله‌ی منتشر شده در سایت پاپ‌مَد در سال 2015 بیان شده که:
حتی بیمارانی که نوار مغزی آنها دارای خط صاف است (و مطلقاً هیچ فعل و انفعالی ندارند!)، تجربیاتی را تجربه کرده‌اند که زندگی را تغییر می‌دهند.
علاوه بر این، مطالعات روی افراد نابینا که تصاویر بصری را در طول تجارب نزدیک به مرگ درک کردند، از مفهوم ادراک بدون بستر فیزیولوژیکی حمایت می‌کنند (10).

Even patients whose EEGs have flat-lined have had life-changing experiences. Moreover, studies on blind individuals who perceived visual images during near-death experiences support the notion of perception without a physiological substrate (10).

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles...

یعنی یک بستر درک وجود دارد در انسان که هیچ ربطی به مغز و فعل و انفعالتش ندارد و این خط بطلانی بر این فرضیه‌ی الحادی است که با معارف وحیانی نیز بطلانش مسلم است که البته اینجا به ذکر ادله‌ی علمی برای بطلان این نظریه اکتفا شده.

[Groucho42 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was referenced in a collection of AI essays and I had to wonder what one of the discoverers of DNA had to say. It's a nice overview of the brain's functions as it relates to visual processing. To those interested in deep learning, there is some very interesting description that shows why we think of it as neural networks.

However, the hypothesis, that consciousness is based on the brain, not some mystical soul, isn't Astonishing, it's not even a surprise. In addition, the constant use of horrendous redundancies such as "gathered together" were like fingernails on a chalk board. When's the last time you gathered apart?

It's a nice books for an overview of the knowledge of the brain in the early 1990s, but I didn't find it as inciteful as the author who referenced it did.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

The majority of this book talked about our visual system and how our eyes and brain perceive images in the world. Before reading the book, I thought that it was going to be talking about souls/consciousness. I think consciousness is a much more interesting problem than vision since no other animals are known to be fully conscious and self-aware in the same way as humans. So I was a bit disappointed with the book, but if you were very interested in how our eyes and optical processing system works, it could be a very interesting book.

[Paul Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read, or tried to read this book in 2023. It is now 30 years old. I was able to get through the first half before it became too dense. I skimmed the last half, looking for tidbits. I was seduced by the title; I thought it would be more focused on consciousness and the soul. However it was highly focused on the current state of scientific research into how the brain processes vision in 1994. Read only if you want to find out what was happening three decades ago.

[Yejin Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

부제는 '영혼에 관한 과학적 탐구'이다. 이 책은 의식의 신비를 과학적인 관점에서 어떻게 설명할 것인지를 다룬 책이다. 그리고 책 제목이 말하는 놀라운 가설이란 바로 '사람의 즐거움, 슬픔, 소중한 기억, 야망, 자존감, 자유의지 이 모든 것들이 실제로는 신경세포의 거대한 집합 또는 그 신경세포들과 연관된 분자들의 작용에 불과하다'는 가설이다. 그리고 이 책은 지각 중에서 특히 시각적 지각, '본다'는 행위를 깊이 탐구한다.

의식과 자유의지는 몇 권을 읽더라도 알쏭달쏭하고 더 알고 싶어지는 주제다. 비교적 옛날 책이고 긴 책이긴 하지만 고전인만큼 한 번 읽어볼만한 가치는 충분하다. 나는 발췌독으로 몇 부분만 읽었다. 개인적으로 '의식의 창발'이라는 개념이 이해가 어려웠는데, (비록 뇌와 인공 신경망의 작동 방식이 같지는 않지만) 인공 신경망을 수학적으로 설명한 글과 영상을 보고 나서야 어렴풋이 알 것 같았다.

[Alphan Lodi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Francis Crick 1962 Nobel ödülünü almış İngiliz fizikçi ve biyokimyacı. Bilimsel araştırmalarının çoğunda beynin karmaşıklığını çözmeyi hedeflemiş. Kitapta “görmenin” nörobiyolojik şeması çıkarılıyor. Bilincin genel doğası, dikkat ve bellek, insan beyninin ana hatları, nöron ağları gibi konularda hem aydınlatıcı; düşündürücü bir eser.

[arjen k. · Rating 1 out of 5]

i found this book quite repetitive. it was impossible to read, not because the subject was not interesting but the way it was explained.
i liked that they tried to give the reader some visual examples but at some point, they overdid it and i became sick of seeing pictures every other page.

[Bahar Mostafaei · Rating 2 out of 5]

بسیار بی هدف و پراکنده نوشته شده. طوری که عنوان ربط خاصی با متن کتاب نداره.
نتونستم تا اخر بخونمش به نظرم وقت تلف کردن بود

[Lazarus Long · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful

[Salar · Rating 5 out of 5]

You should!

[Randeep · Rating 4 out of 5]

The comprehensive coverage of visual awareness and consciousness topic with good literature survey and further areas that need to be explore to understand mysteries of Human mind …

[Jordi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lo leí cuando lo publicaron y me fascinó. Lo que aprendí me abrió la mente y se me quedó marcado.

[Michael Connolly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Consciousness

Francis Crick studies the mind-body problem of philosophy using a scientific approach. It appears that consciousness involves only more recently evolved parts of the brain, and does not exist in lower animals. Consciousness was ignored by the behavioral psychologists John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner. Francis Crick did much of his work in collaboration with Christof Koch of CalTech.

Focusing on Vision

Crick decided to focus his attention on vision, short-term memory, and iconic memory, which is short-term visual memory. Crick discusses the distinction between automatic preattentive visual processing and the conscious attentive visual processing. This distinction was explored in a series of experiments by Anne M. Treisman of the University of British Columbia and Garry Gelade of Oxford University, who developed the the feature-integration theory to explain it.

Brain Anatomy

Crick talks about the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus, which has been called the gateway to the visual cortex. Crick talks about the thalamic reticular nucleus, which surrounds lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus, as being the guardian of the thalamic gateway. Crick believes the thalamic reticular nucleus is in involved in visual attention.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mainly concerned with visual awareness, this is quite a dense tome. Written in 1994, right around the time research from fMRIs were being published in peer review journals, so the research Crick cites is often reliant on the MRI.

"Whatever the answer, the only sensible way to arrive at it is through detailed scientific research. All other approaches are little more than whistling to keep our courage up. Man is endowed with a relentless curiosity about the world. We cannot be satisfied forever by the guesses of yesterday, however much the charms of tradition and ritual may, for a time, lull our doubts about their validity. We must hammer away until we have forged a clear and valid picture not only of this vast universe in which we live but also of our very selves."

"Of making many books there is no end;
and much study is weariness of the flesh."
~Ecclesiastes 12:12

"Give me fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truths to yourself."
-Vilfredo Pareto