I loved this book because it changed the way I
see the world. Andy describes the latest thinking about perception as
‘controlled hallucination.’ What we are doing when we see is making predictions
about the world and then updating them as the information comes in.
Our nervous
system is a multi-layered hierarchical predictive processing network, and our
experiences are the hallucinations it creates while trying to make sense of the
world.
I found all my experience changed – and is still changing – by beginning
to understand the theory of predictive processing. This applies as much to my
daily meditation as walking around in nature or sitting at my desk working.
For as long as we've studied the mind, we've believed that information flowing from our senses determines what our mind perceives. But as our understanding has advanced in the last few decades, a hugely powerful new view has flipped this assumption on its head. The brain is not a passive receiver, but an ever-active predictor.
At the forefront of this cognitive revolution is widely acclaimed philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark, who has synthesized his ground-breaking work on the predictive brain to explore its fascinating mechanics and implications. Among the most stunning of these is the realization that experience itself,…
This
book grabbed me – and I very rarely get through any work of fiction without
giving up. It’s romantic, heartbreaking, and silly, but it spoke to me of the
struggles of women in science.
Set in the 1950s it is before my time, but then
things were not so very different in the 1970s when I set out as a female
scientist. Yes, I was groped by my supervisor (though frankly, as I am now
embarrassed to recall, I didn’t mind at all).
I was given inappropriate
invitations to conferences (we can share a room) and overlooked opportunities men would easily have gained. I loved identifying with a woman
who beat her assailant back.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK • Meet Elizabeth Zott: a “formidable, unapologetic and inspiring” (PARADE) scientist in 1960s California whose career takes a detour when she becomes the unlikely star of a beloved TV cooking show in this novel that is “irresistible, satisfying and full of fuel. It reminds you that change takes time and always requires heat” (The New York Times Book Review).
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Oprah Daily, Newsweek, GoodReads
"A unique heroine ... you'll find yourself wishing she wasn’t fictional." —Seattle Times…
This multi-award-winning book is yet another addition
to the confusing but vibrant field of consciousness studies. There are too many
of these books, and I nearly didn’t persevere, but after a slow start (yeah,
yeah, the ‘hard problem’ etc.), it got really interesting.
I don’t think he has
really given us a radical new theory of consciousness,’ but I love his ‘Beast
theory’ of being human. We are beasts through and through but concoct models of
self that make us out to be something much more exotic than a bundle of
neurally encoded predictions that serve to keep our bodies alive—all good, challenging stuff.
A BOOK OF THE YEAR GUARDIAN, THE ECONOMIST, NEW STATESMAN, FINANCIAL TIMES, BLOOMBERG
Anil Seth's radical new theory of consciousness challenges our understanding of perception and reality, doing for brain science what Dawkins did for evolutionary biology.
'A brilliant beast of a book.' DAVID BYRNE
'Hugely important.' JIM AL-KHALILI
'Masterly . . . An exhilarating book: a vast-ranging, phenomenal achievement that will undoubtedly become a seminal text.' GAIA VINCE, GUARDIAN
Being You is not as simple as it sounds. Somehow, within each of our brains, billions of neurons work to create our conscious experience. How does this happen? Why do…
Back in the late 1990s, when I was terribly ill with chronic fatigue, I reread, very, very slowly, Richard Dawkins’ famous book The Selfish Gene, in which he invented the term ‘meme’ to mean a second replicator after genes. I became obsessed with the idea of memes and of us humans as meme machines
So much fell into place, not just in evolutionary theory but as the Internet was being born, email was starting, and computer viruses were taking off, that all this now made sense.
By the time I was well enough to write anything, the whole of The Meme Machine was there in my head. Amazingly, it is still popular and still relevant – or even more relevant - today.
