The new book by the famous neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux has a short title “Consciousness”. It deals with the very specific question of what role the parts of our brain play in certain perceptions. In doing so, he took back a broad arc from humans to the first single-celled organism – and later to the Big Bang and the creation of Earth.
Everything is connected
Because everything is interconnected and builds upon one another: the workings of our consciousness can only be understood if it is connected with the history of its development in millions of years of evolution. LeDoux writes in the introduction, if you want to understand how computers work, you should not start with early Apple and Microsoft processors until the 1970s, but also deal with the chip base.
This is why Lido starts at the beginning of his book. It tells us how some chemical elements combined to form increasingly complex compounds, until the first living organisms appeared four billion years ago. This follows the history of evolution from unicellular to multicellular, to increasingly complex organisms that eventually develop eyes and later backbones. The author describes all this in a concise and clear way. The short chapters about the steps in the evolution of life build on one another, but they remain self-contained and are a good opportunity to update or gain new knowledge about Earth’s primordial atmosphere, eukaryotes, or the Cambrian explosion.
It gets a little more complicated when LeDoux, after riding through evolution, returns to humans, and thus to the question of what exactly human consciousness is and how it differs from the perception of other animals. The subject has been the primary area of his research for more than 40 years. Here he knows every cycle in the history of ideas and every little shift in formative terminology from the inside out. Ordinary people’s head can spin fast: what are the behaviorists convinced of, and how do they differ from the cognitive? Working memory, rolling perception, prefrontal cortex – the glossary will be useful so that you do not lose track of your directions in the jungle of terms and the people who formulated, developed and reinterpreted them.
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