A personal and profound book on consciousness by an acclaimed neuropsychologist, as ambitious as it is timely. When celebrated neuropsychologist Paul Broks's wife died of cancer, it sent him into a spiral of grief and reflection on what it meant to be human. The result is a gorgeous, evocative meditation on consciousness--Oliver Sacks meets Alain de Botton. Told in discrete chapters that combine medicine, psychology, history, myth, memoir, and even fiction, Broks uses every tool at his disposal to build a cumulative portrait of what it means to be conscious, and at its essence what it means to be human. It's a journey that retraces some of Broks's own most fascinating cases as a clinician--patients with brain injuries that revealed something fundamental about how our gray matter gives rise to who we believe ourselves to be. Using these as a loose arc, Broks weaves together imaginative stories of everything from artificial intelligence to Schopenhauer to the Greek philosophers to jazz guitarist Pat Martino in order to sketch a beautiful, inimitable view of humanness that is as heartbreaking at it is affirming. About the Author: Paul Broks is an English neuropsychologist and science writer. He is a regular contributor to Prospect, and his work has been featured in The Times, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, and Granta. Trained as a clinical psychologist at Oxford University, Broks is a specialist in neuropsychology and is the author of Into the Silent Land, which was shortlisted for The Guardian's First Book Award. |