What is consciousness?

How do your billions of tiny brain cells build consciousness as they chatter away with electrical spikes and chemical signals? And why is your laptop, with its sophisticated algorithms and billions of parts, presumably not conscious? Could other large systems like a city become conscious? And what does this have to do with ant hills, blue birds, or your memory of your first kiss? Join Eagleman on a journey into one of the central mysteries of neuroscience: why we have awareness.

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More Information:
Eagleman DM, Beamish J. (2015). The Brain [TV series]. Blink Films; PBS.

The Astonishing Hypothesis. The Scientific Search for the Soul. Francis Crick. Scribner, New York, 1994

Tononi G. Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul. Pantheon; 2012

Eagleman SL, Eagleman DM, Menon V, Meador KJ. A call for comparing theories of consciousness and data sharing. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 2022 Mar 23;45:e47.

Baars BJ. Global workspace theory of consciousness: toward a cognitive neuroscience of human experience. Progress in brain research. 2005 Jan 1;150:45-53.

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"A popularizer of impressive gusto...[Eagleman] aims, grandly, to do for the study of the mind what Copernicus did for the study of the stars."
- New York Observer

"David Eagleman offers startling lessons.... His method is to ask us to cast off our lazy commonplace assumptions.
- The Guardian

"What Eagleman seems to be calling for is a new Enlightenment."
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"Eagleman has a talent for testing the untestable, for taking seemingly sophomoric notions and using them to nail down the slippery stuff of consciousness."
- The New Yorker