Posts by Brian Hines

I'm back!... to writing about Michael Graziano's super-interesting book, "Consciousness and the Social Brain." It was the subject of my Awareness is a fictionalized sketch of attention, which encapsulated the central theme of his neuroscientific theory. Every time I pick up the book I'm challenged to look at myself and the world in a fresh way. A believable way. Yet sometimes, a rather disturbing way. Like when I read this morning, after Graziano described how a ventriloquist makes a puppet look like it is alive, he said: It seems crazy to insist that the puppet's consciousness is real. And yet,…

The title of this post is a quote from p. 79 of Michael Graziano's highly persuasive and fascinating book, "Consciousness and the Social Brain." As noted in my previous post about neuroscientist Graziano's creative theory about what awareness is, I bought the book after reading an article by the author. I'm loving it. Probably the best book about the brain I've ever read, and I've read a lot. Graziano is an excellent writer (cover says he is "an award winning novelist). His take on awareness makes more sense than anything mystics, philosophers, meditators, or other scientists have come up with.…

I'm almost 65, but I like to think of myself as a modern with-it guy. Hey, I've got an iPhone 5; I ride five miles on my longboard/skateboard several times a week; I watched the entire freaking MTV Video Music Awards (and could even understand some of the song lyrics). But there's one thing I'm decidedly old-fashioned about: I believe in facts. This goes against the grain of some widely pervasive viewpoints. Like post-modern deconstruction. And pre-modern religiosity. Sorry, fact-deniers. I'm going to cling to my beloved facts. When I was a kid my mother used to buy the World Almanac…

Here's a really interesting piece by neuroscientist Michael Graziano, "Consciousness and the Unashamed Rationalist." Naturally I just ordered Graziano's book, Consciousness and the Social Brain. His distinction between attention and awareness makes a lot of sense. As Graziano says below, his theory posits that awareness "is the brain's own fuzzy description of attention. A brain attends to thing X; the brain constructs the description, 'I am aware of thing X.'" Read the whole thing: Theories of consciousness are always a difficult sell because the topic is fraught with religious and spiritual issues. Almost all people who think about the question,…

Who needs spiritual/religious mysticism? Science has plenty of it. And here's the great thing: it is real! In the August 31 issue of New Scientist magazine I came across a letter to the editor that blew my mind. Repeatedly. Because every time I re-read the letter, I got the same Whhhhhaaaaaatttttt? sensation. Wilken Sporys from Christmas Hills, Victoria, Australia commented on a New Scientist story about the nature of reality that I blogged about last month. The basic notion of the story was "Something has to go -- reality, relativity, causality, free will. They can't all coexist as how they…