
The Consciousness Instinct
Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind
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Narrated by:
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David Colacci
About this listen
“The father of cognitive neuroscience” illuminates the past, present, and future of the mind-brain problem
How do neurons turn into minds? How does physical “stuff” - atoms, molecules, chemicals, and cells - create the vivid and various worlds inside our heads? The problem of consciousness has gnawed at us for millennia. In the last century there have been massive breakthroughs that have rewritten the science of the brain, and yet the puzzles faced by the ancient Greeks are still present. In The Consciousness Instinct, the neuroscience pioneer Michael S. Gazzaniga puts the latest research in conversation with the history of human thinking about the mind, giving a big-picture view of what science has revealed about consciousness.
The idea of the brain as a machine, first proposed centuries ago, has led to assumptions about the relationship between mind and brain that dog scientists and philosophers to this day. Gazzaniga asserts that this model has it backward - brains make machines, but they cannot be reduced to one. New research suggests the brain is actually a confederation of independent modules working together. Understanding how consciousness could emanate from such an organization will help define the future of brain science and artificial intelligence, and close the gap between brain and mind.
Captivating and accessible, with insights drawn from a lifetime at the forefront of the field, The Consciousness Instinct sets the course for the neuroscience of tomorrow.
©2018 Michael S. Gazzaniga (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Performance
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Futurists insist that AI will soon eclipse the capacities of the most gifted human mind. What hope do we have against superintelligent machines? But we aren't really on the path to developing intelligent machines. In fact, we don't even know where that path might be. Erik Larson takes us on a tour of the landscape of AI to show how far we are from superintelligence and what it would take to get there.
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dead wrong after 2 years
- By K. Lyon on 07-11-23
By: Erik J. Larson
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The Developing Mind, Third Edition
- How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are
- By: Daniel J. Siegel M.D.
- Narrated by: Fred Stella
- Length: 31 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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This highly influential work - now in a revised and expanded third edition incorporating major advances in the field - gives clinicians, educators, and students a new understanding of what the mind is, how it grows, and how to promote healthy development and resilience.
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Life changing
- By robin fletcher on 11-03-20
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Space Oddities
- The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe
- By: Harry Cliff
- Narrated by: Harry Cliff
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Something strange is going on in the cosmos. Scientists are uncovering a catalogue of weird phenomena that simply can’t be explained by our long-established theories of the universe. After decades of fruitless searching, could we finally be catching glimpses of a profound new view of our physical world? Or are we being fooled by cruel tricks of the data? In Space Oddities, Harry Cliff, a physicist who does cutting-edge work on the Large Hadron Collider, provides a riveting look at the universe’s most confounding puzzles.
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as compelling as a mystery novel and very informative
- By jimpgh@aol.com on 04-22-24
By: Harry Cliff
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Other Minds
- The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
- By: Peter Godfrey-Smith
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how subjective experience crept into being—how nature became aware of itself. As Godfrey-Smith stresses, it is a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared.
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Mischief and Craft
- By Darwin8u on 08-10-17
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Ways of Attending
- How Our Divided Brain Constructs the World
- By: Iain McGilchrist
- Narrated by: Mike Fraser
- Length: 1 hr
- Unabridged
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Attention is not just receptive, but actively creative of the world we inhabit. How we attend makes all the difference to the world we experience. And nowadays in the West we generally attend in a rather unusual way: governed by the narrowly focused, target-driven left hemisphere of the brain.
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Great summary
- By L_Haynes on 05-11-25
By: Iain McGilchrist
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Conscious
- A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind
- By: Annaka Harris
- Narrated by: Annaka Harris
- Length: 2 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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This mind-expanding dive into the mystery of consciousness is an illuminating meditation on the self, free will, and felt experience.
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Perhaps a better definition?
- By Eratosthenes on 06-19-19
By: Annaka Harris
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Waves in an Impossible Sea
- How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean
- By: Matt Strassler
- Narrated by: Christopher Grove
- Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In Waves in an Impossible Sea, physicist Matt Strassler tells a startling tale of elementary particles, human experience, and empty space. He begins with a simple mystery of motion. When we drive at highway speeds with the windows down, the wind beats against our faces. Yet our planet hurtles through the cosmos at 150 miles per second, and we feel nothing of it. How can our voyage be so tranquil when, as Einstein discovered, matter warps space, and space deflects matter? The answer, Strassler reveals, is that empty space is a sea, albeit a paradoxically strange one.
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No pdf
- By Mark on 01-14-25
By: Matt Strassler
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A Thousand Brains
- A New Theory of Intelligence
- By: Jeff Hawkins, Richard Dawkins - foreword
- Narrated by: Jamie Renell, Richard Dawkins
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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For all of neuroscience's advances, we've made little progress on its biggest question: How do simple cells in the brain create intelligence? Jeff Hawkins and his team discovered that the brain uses map-like structures to build a model of the world - not just one model, but hundreds of thousands of models of everything we know. This discovery allows Hawkins to answer important questions about how we perceive the world, why we have a sense of self, and the origin of high-level thought.
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Starts out good, ends up a train wreck
- By Warren on 03-15-21
By: Jeff Hawkins, and others
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The Master and His Emissary
- The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
- By: Iain McGilchrist
- Narrated by: Dennis Kleinman
- Length: 27 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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This pioneering account sets out to understand the structure of the human brain - the place where mind meets matter. Until recently, the left hemisphere of our brain has been seen as the "rational" side, the superior partner to the right. But is this distinction true? Drawing on a vast body of experimental research, Iain McGilchrist argues while our left brain makes for a wonderful servant, it is a very poor master.
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The Master and His Emissary
- By Michael on 11-07-20
By: Iain McGilchrist
worth the read for discussion of consciousness
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In this context his attempt to provide a hypothesis on consciousness can be described as the closest science can come to explaining the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
The book takes us through a history of philosophy and science relating to the mind and the brain the dualism of Descartes, the reductionism schools and modern science, the quantum world of complementarity, and finally the authors proposal as to what the mind is and how it relates to the brain.
The author brings a new perspective to consciousness, one that accepts the possibility of a subjective system that cannot be reduced producing qualia analogous to other instincts. He proposes consciousness as an instinct evolving out of necessity to improve our survivability in complex situations. A continuum which he suggests is very likely present in different ways and degrees in all living things.
This book is highly recommended and a must read for anyone interested in the subject.
Consciousness through the lens of Neuroscience
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An amicable introduction to modern neuroscience
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He does, however, make a good case for a reasonable architecture of the mammalian Brain as a modular structure of functions that communicate with each other in a complex network of layers. He follows closely William James’ theory that this communication network constitute an instinct that we call consciousness.
While his research doesn’t lead him to claim that he totally understands all the how’s and why’s of the logistics of its operation, he does put it forth as a framework to be used by neuroengineers, biologists and others to work together to further this endeavor.
This book may not be the latest work to try to define consciousness but Gazzaniga’s theory is definitely well stated and documented and this book is accessible and enjoyable to the lay reader. Four Stars. ****
Well-done dissection of his Theory of Consciousness
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Linda s incredible book has the exact attacks.
5 Starred for the year published. Linda F Barrett
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One Of The Truly Great...
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I heard him giving the Gifford Lectures
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An interesting and compelling idea, but slow start
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A fantastical overview of conscious thought
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very informing and iteresting book
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