Consciousness, 'the last great mystery for science', remains a hot topic. How can a physical brain create our experience of the world? What creates our identity? Do we really have free will? Could consciousness itself be an illusion? Exciting new developments in brain science are continuing the debates on these issues, and the field has now expanded to include biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers. This controversial book clarifies the potentially confusing arguments...

Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand their own mind and to find a spiritual path that is compatible with scienceAs an impressionable young student, Susan Blackmore had an intense, dramatic and life-changing experience, seeming to leave her body and travel the world. With no rational explanation for her out-of-body experience (OBE) she turned to astral projection and the paranormal, but soon despaired of finding answers. Decades later, a Swiss neurosur...

Humans are extraordinary creatures, with the unique ability among animals to imitate and so copy from one another ideas, habits, skills, behaviours, inventions, songs, and stories. These are all memes, a term first coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 in his book The Selfish Gene. Memes, like genes, are replicators, and this enthralling book is an investigation of whether this link between genes and memes can lead to important discoveries about the nature of the inner self.Confronting the dee...

Blackmore explores the big questions on the nature of brains, minds, and consciousness, through twenty lively and engaging interviews with some of the best-known personalities from the worlds of science and philosophy. - ;A delightful collection of interviews with 20 famous names in the study of consciousness. Sue Blackmore, herself a writer on consciousness, engages in conversation with each of these very different personalities, drawing out their views on the nature of the mind, on how w...

Consciousness, 'the last great mystery for science', remains a hot topic. How can a physical brain create our experience of the world? What creates our identity? Do we really have free will? Could consciousness itself be an illusion? Exciting new developments in brain science are continuing the debates on these issues, and the field has now expanded to include biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers. This controversial book clarifies the potentially confusing arguments...

First coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, a meme is any idea, behavior, or skill that can be transferred from one person to another by imitation: stories, fashions, inventions, recipes, songs, ways of plowing a field or throwing a baseball or making a sculpture.Susan Blackmore shows that once our distant ancestors acquired the crucial ability to imitate, a second kind of natural selection began, a survival of the fittest amongst competing ideas ...

Humans are extraordinary creatures, with the unique ability among animals to imitate and so copy from one another ideas, habits, skills, behaviours, inventions, songs, and stories. These are all memes, a term first coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 in his book The Selfish Gene. Memes, like genes, are replicators, and this enthralling book is an investigation of whether this link between genes and memes can lead to important discoveries about the nature of the inner self. Confronti...

Qu’est-ce qui distingue les hommes des animaux ? Le langage ? La raison ? La conscience ? La créativité ? Et s’il ne s’agissait là que de leurres ? Et si la spécificité de l’homme, c’était avant tout son incroyable capacité à imiter ses semblables ? Nous sommes, déclare Susan Blackmore, des machines mimétiques contagieuses. Tandis que les gènes utilisent le corps humain dans leur lutte pour la suprématie des caractères physiques, les mèmes colonisent nos cerveaux pour dominer nos comportem...

Consciousness, "the last great mystery for science," remains a hot topic. How can a physical brain create our experience of the world? What creates our identity? Do we really have free will? Could consciousness itself be an illusion?Exciting new developments in brain science are continuing the debates on these issues, and the field has now expanded to include biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers. This controversial book clarifies the potentially confusing ar...

The Mysteries of Knowledge Beyond the Senses: Dialogues with Courageous Scientists reports on the current research and personal characteristics of 22 visionaries from the US and the UK. They reveal information about learning from other dimensions, altered states of consciousness, extrasensory perception, dreams, near-death experiences, remote viewing, parapsychology, etc. Vanguard scientists believe there is more than what we see and are formulating a non-materialist paradigm that expands ...

Now in its fourth edition, this highly popular text is the definitive introduction to consciousness, exploring the key theories and evidence in consciousness studies ranging from neuroscience and psychology to quantum theories and philosophy.Written by mother and daughter author team Susan Blackmore and Emily Troscianko, the book examines why the term ‘consciousness’ has no recognised definition. It also provides an opportunity to delve into personal intuitions about the self, mind...

Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility investigates the philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism and their implications. Skepticism about free will and moral responsibility has been on the rise in recent years. In fact, a significant number of philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists now either doubt or outright deny the existence of free will and/or moral responsibility—and the list of prominent skeptics appears to grow by the day. Give...