The Feeling of What Happens

I like to read about the human brain, and especially the subject of consciousness, so this book by Antonio Damasio was interesting TO ME -- but probably not to "normal humans".

It provides essentially a lot of detail on the theory that there are two types of consciousness -- "core consciousness" and "extended consciousness". He considers core to be an artifact of the body reflecting "current state" into some key low level brain stem regions that he calls the "proto self", or the mental image of the living body. There is a lot of discussion of how one "becomes awake" -- at least which regions of the brain have to be operating and maybe what is happening in them.

"Extended consciousness" takes our whole brain -- long term memory, our "life's story". While our "core" pretty much operates in "1 min short term memory bursts", the "extended" keeps track of all we have been and our hopes of all we will be -- even the core is clearly "human" in that it is more than animal, but it is the extended consciousness that is what we see as the "highest form or life on the planet".

There are lots of detailed long names for parts of the brain that nobody but a practicioner is likely to completely remember and keep straight, and there are a lot of very interesting stories about what happens when certain parts of the brain are damaged by some sort of disease or injuury. These are often interesting as well as scary.

I liked the book, but unless one has a true interest in quite a bit of depth on the neurological underpinnings of consciousness, it will be a slog.