"teeming with fascinating and enlightening insights" Observer
A narrative investigation into the new science of plant intelligence and sentience, from National Association of Science Writers Award winner and Livingston Award finalist Zoe Schlanger.
Look at the green organism across the room or through the window: the potted plant, or the grass or a tree. Think how a life spent constantly growing yet rooted in a single spot comes with tremendous challenges. To meet them, plants have come up with some of the most creative methods for surviving of any living thing - us included. Many are so ingenious that they…
'This is a tale that never takes its foot off the accelerator . . . Part journey into the dark heart of Australia, part love story, this electric, defiant, darkly funny memoir is fuelled by the outsized passions of youth and tempered by the retrospective wisdom of age.' Sydney Morning Herald
'Hilarious, terrifying and fun - much like the 80s, only smarter.' ANNA FUNDER
'Fiercely funny. This is a road trip of danger, love and hope. Brilliant!' JULIA ZEMIRO
'Witty, brave, honest and wise. Mad Max meets 1980s feminism, fuelled by undergraduate outrage and hedonism.' CATHERINE LUMBY
“Remarkable: a book about borders that makes the reader feel sumptuously free.” —Peter Pomerantsev
In this extraordinary work of narrative reportage, Kapka Kassabova returns to Bulgaria, from where she emigrated as a girl twenty-five years previously, to explore the border it shares with Turkey and Greece. When she was a child, the border zone was rumored to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, and it swarmed with soldiers and spies. On holidays in the “Red Riviera” on the Black Sea, she remembers playing on the beach only miles from a bristling electrified fence whose…
Most studies of consciousness proceed from a standpoint where external reality already pre-exists. As such, these studies would be inherently unable to recognize it if consciousness in fact arose at the same level where reality itself takes its source―at the level where wave functions collapse and thereby generate the fabric of material reality.
At the same time, a number of compelling contemporary interpretations of physics strongly hint that consciousness must most likely be a fundamental constituent of reality, that it cannot be emergent, and that the role of the brain is limited to the harnessing, optimization, and deployment of consciousness within material reality―aka the realm of collapsed wave functions. This view seems to be also supported by a range of credible observations made by a number of credible professionals who operate at the margins of studies of consciousness, such as psychiatrists, who occasionally observe puzzling cases involving unusual phenomena related to consciousness. If we back-engineer the inevitable macroscopic consequences of a consciousness born at the same level as the building blocks of physical reality itself, we discover that such marginal phenomena become then fully explainable. The book offers readers new insights into interpretations of current research in physics and enables readers without a background in physics to understand the implications and their relevance to our understanding of consciousness.
