Consciousness Science

Mark Gober dives into fundamental beliefs about health and disease. These beliefs are so fundamental, in fact, that most of us probably haven’t thought to question them. For example, do bacteria cause disease, or are they part of the body’s cleanup crew that appears at the scene of an underlying toxicity or injury? Do researchers follow the scientific method when they claim to isolate viruses and show that they cause disease in their hosts? In addition to exploring these essential questions, Gober goes a layer deeper by examining the nature of consciousness.

Whitehead presented these three lectures at Princeton University in 1929. Although 85 years have passed, his central thesis and his analysis remain remarkably current. The scientific materialism that Whitehead opposed with such vigor continues to dominate in academic circles, and even now those who question that worldview are often accused of being antiscientific. This is especially true in discussions of the nature of the human mind and its relation to the body (particularly the brain).

What makes us who we are? Many think that we are just complicated machines, or animals that are different from machines only by being conscious. Richard Swinburne comes to the defense of the soul and presents new philosophical arguments that are supported by modern neuroscience. When scientific advances enable neuroscientists to transplant a part of brain into a new body, he reasons, no matter how much we can find out about their brain activity or conscious experiences, we will never know whether the resulting person is the same as before or somebody entirely new.

This audiobook is a plea for self-trust and a gentle guide to self-awareness. Instead of helping you become who you think you should be, The Art of Talking to Yourself hopes to introduce you to someone more interesting: who you are.

In Reconnecting to the Source he unpacks the science behind spiritual experience, investigating the ways in which we can access realms of experience beyond the everyday. It is in these moments, when our conscious minds are in contact or perhaps even overridden by our unconscious selves, that we can explore the depths of spiritual meaning. In addition to a foreword by Deepak Chopra, the book includes new, never before published contributions from a long list of well-known writers and public figures.

From the author of Proust and the Squid, a lively, ambitious, and deeply informative epistolary book that considers the future of the reading brain and our capacity for critical thinking, empathy, and reflection as we become increasingly dependent on digital technologies. A decade ago, Maryanne...

Respect, trust, and commitment are the cornerstones of a dedicated relationship between a teacher and a student. For a passionate student yearning to learn and understand the essence of a subject, they must demonstrate these traits before a teacher will take them under their wing. In this case, the teacher was Thomas Troward of Cornwall England and the student was Genevieve Behrend. He imparted his personal insight to the one and only pupil who could perpetuate this knowledge and share it with the world.

Alva Noë is one of a new breed - part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part neuroscientist - who are radically altering the study of consciousness by asking difficult questions and pointing out obvious flaws in the current science. In Out of Our Heads, he restates and reexamines the problem of consciousness, and then proposes a startling solution: Do away with the 200-year-old paradigm that places consciousness within the confines of the brain.

This New York Times bestseller is an exciting and fearless investigation of language Bestselling author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas. His previous books...

If the history of the Earth were compressed down to a year, our species would arise in the last thirty minutes or so of the final hour. But life itself is not such a late arrival: It has existed on Earth for something like 3.7 billion years—most of our planet’s history and over a quarter of the age of the universe (as far as we can tell). What have these organisms—bacteria, animals, plants, and the rest—done in all this time? In Living on Earth, the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes a new way of understanding how the actions of living beings have shaped our planet.

Thomas Troward was a judge in British-administered India who wrote and lectured widely on the power of the mind, and became president of the International New Thought Alliance. The Hidden Power comprises a collection of Troward's essays on consciousness, symbolism, psychology, and mental science.

Conscious Living is a practical guide for the individual that brings new insights into a fundamental truth of daily life. Five simple lessons of "conscious living", rooted in the ancient traditions of Stoicism and Taoism, help us overcome obstacles and fears and awaken our own creativity.

Depending on No-Thing is a clear and unsentimental look at what remains when the imagined center of “me” falls away. Robert Saltzman writes from lived experience, not doctrine. He dismantles the spiritual promises of final answers and special states, turning attention instead to the simplicity of experience as it actually shows up—without metaphysical storylines, without self-improvement agendas, without a someone behind the curtain.

This is a new edition of the classic Colin Wilson collection The Essential Colin Wilson (first published in 1985), updated and introduced by Wilson's bibliographer Colin Stanley. It is the only book to contain extracts from Colin Wilson's most important work in one volume, including The Outsider, A Criminal History of Mankind, The New Existentialism, The Occult, New Pathways in Psychology, and Mysteries, as well as three of his novels and many other texts.

Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept - the mind - emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine but fully neither.

No listener curious about our "little gray cells" will want to pass up Harvard neuroscientist John E. Dowling's brief introduction to the brain. In this up-to-date revision of his 1998 book Creating Mind, Dowling conveys the essence and vitality of the field of neuroscience - examining the progress we've made in understanding how brains work, and shedding light on discoveries having to do with aging, mental illness, and brain health.

Nothing seems more real than the minds of other people. When you consider what your boss is thinking or whether your spouse is happy, you are admitting them into the "mind club". It's easy to assume other humans can think and feel, but what about a cow, a computer, a corporation? What kinds of minds do they have? Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray are award-winning psychologists who have discovered that minds - while incredibly important - are a matter of perception.

Our human energy “blueprint” is in a constant state of flux as we grow and change. As our creative ability expands, and our ability to fulfill the potential for a peaceful, just, and sustainable world grows, knowing about the new Global Cycle we’re about to enter has never been more important.

From celebrated business school professor and author of Edge, a research-backed framework for honing and harnessing your intuition to make the right decisions and attain greater levels of achievement. What sets the most successful people apart? You may think that the correct answer is hard work...

Philosophy of Mind: A Very Short Introduction probes some of the great philosophical questions about the mind: What is the relationship between mind and matter? Can science unravel the mystery of consciousness? How can our thoughts represent things in the world? Are computers genuinely intelligent? In the book, Barbara Gail Montero highlights key thought experiments used by philosophers to explore the nature of mind and how mind and body relate to each other (the mind-body problem).