Books like Consciousness Explained Better — picked by fans

Nobel prize winner Gerald Edelman sums up in this book a model of human consciousness that has greatly informed my understanding. The framework he constructs involves intricate interconnections among myriad brain components— interconnections that operate according to a dynamic process that he terms “re-entry."

Written in a voice that is quite professorial, this book requires concentrated study, and is a must-have text for the serious student of human consciousness.

Of the dozens of books on neuroscience that I have in my library, I consider this one the most comprehensive and authoritative. I quote passages from it extensively in my own book. Its scope and richness qualify it as a primary text for neuroscience students. Buzsáki has enabled me to understand some of the most intricate structures and functions of the human brain.

Les Fehmi (recently deceased, to my great sadness) was a mentor of mine from the early days of biofeedback training decades ago. He was truly one of the great pioneers in the study of consciousness and the brain. This book, co-authored with Jim Robbins, is a succinct presentation of his brilliant discoveries about the deep mysteries of attention as a gateway to experiencing the most subtle aspects of consciousness in general.

In this uniquely structured book, Dan Siegel covers the major elements of interpersonal neurobiology, which is one of the most exciting theoretical constructs currently available. Siegel and I are definitely on the same page in applying complex dynamical systems theory to the understanding of mind/body integration, consciousness, and the essential role of interpersonal relationships in healthy human development.

This was a best-seller and rightly so.

It covers the broad and often astounding range of animal senses and how they perceive and understand the world they inhabit, their umwelt. Consciousness depends on it, for without senses we would have no path toward self-awareness. While not the same as consciousness, self-awareness is its most important feature.

Dogs and smell, whales and echolocation, bees and ultraviolet light, sharks and electric fields, all shape how differently animals experience their worlds. Knowing this expands our own understanding and appreciation of the one we inhabit. At the same time, it is humbling to acknowledge how the creatures we share the planet with have such different perceptions. In that is great responsibility.

Plants, too, have an umwelt, which makes this a companion to An Immense World.

Plants may not seem like a subject for ethics and philosophy, but the author makes a crucial case for humans changing their behavior toward them. They are neither mute nor static objects; they have senses. They feel things, solve complex problems, communicate with each other in various ways we would call ingenious.

At times, they communicate with animals. Their world is more alien to us than the animals’. I know someone who describes evolution as a story of planimals and aniplants. I initially thought this was a whacky idea, but consider the emerald green sea slug (Elysia chlorotica), a tiny animal that appropriates chloroplasts from algae and photosynthesizes food for the rest of its year-long life.

There is such magic on every page of this book.

This book appeared in 1997 and remains controversial today, but its wildly imaginative and intriguing proposal is well worth reading.

Life in the cosmos, he suggests, is like any familiar organism in important ways; it evolves, grows increasingly complex, matures, and reproduces to create the next generation. Thus, it fits into the theme of these books.

Smolin is not a science fiction writer; however, he’s a theoretical physicist. His suggestions, though they seem wild, carry heft. They also offer poetry, a greater achievement.

Imagine that black holes are the children of a universe. Imagine they have the potential to grow into new universes that can, in turn, engender a sufficient number of such ‘light eaters’ (like black holes or plants) to ensure the survival of one or more; it can perpetuate a procession of universes, an evolutionary success. The scale may be immense, but like animals and plants, it creates… show more.

Humans have struggled with uncertainty since the beginning of our species.

We’ve repeatedly tried to reveal secrets of the future, from the flight of birds or cracks in tortoise shells to seances and think tanks. We ask, what challenges does tomorrow hold, and how can we prepare? We answer as best we can. Today, the most common and even occasionally successful method is smart people thrashing out scenarios based on our best contemporary knowledge and mathematical modeling, boosted by imagination. Imagining After Capitalism is a respectable effort to do just that.

Money is the lens through which most contemporary humans look. Money is of course imaginary, a symbolic system of exchange, an arbiter of fairness, and to some, a god that determines destiny. We think of today’s system as “Late Stage” capitalism, which means something is next. Imagining what we want it to be is the first step to getting… show more.

Most people think of time simply as a passive, mechanical tool for measuring reality. But in this groundbreaking book, Janet Sussman introduces the idea that time is a dynamic field responsible for creating the material universe. Readers interested in the study of consciousness will begin to understand the importance of time to the unfoldment of unity consciousness and self-realization. 

This book is a brilliant combination of the science of consciousness and human development, written in beautiful, lyrical language. It invites the reader into a world that is non-linear yet coherent. It causes the reader to quantum leap over the logical mind into an experiential event of time as one's own consciousness. The author describes her book as giving "voice to the freedom enjoyed by those who can transcend time through their own awareness and be free of imposed restrictions on the naturally holographic avenues of the mind."

A doctor in early twentieth-century Trieste demands that an eccentric patient write his memoirs as a form of psychotherapy. These pages are those memoirs – the doctor calls them all lies – and form the fictional life story of one of my favourite misfits, the unreliable Zeno Cosini, with his horde of idiosyncrasies. Between proposing to three sisters within an hour and making a fortune on the stock market by mistake, he spends his time nurturing his hypochondria and trying to give up smoking, which means endlessly smoking ‘last cigarettes’. A seminal work of modernism, this is another novel with autobiographical ties to the author, and I left it torn between laughter and tears over just how complex, ironic and funny we humans can be.