Download or read book The Gift of Consciousness written by Gitte Bechsgaard and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-12 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meticulously researched and compellingly written, The Gift of Consciousness is an engaging and approachable overview of Patañjali's Yoga Sutras through the prism of both Eastern and Western psychology. Grounded in a thorough knowledge of the Sanskrit original and training in psychology, Gitte Bechsgaard opens out these complex texts to the general reading public. Bechsgaard's clear-eyed approach makes this ancient text relevant to anyone interested in Yoga philosophy and practice. This book ...

Download or read book Gift of Consciousness written by Addittya Tamhankar and published by . This book was released on 2019-08-05 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consciousness is bliss, unconsciousness is misery. No matter how difficult your life is, if you can live with consciousness, no situation or person can ever bring you down. Because consciousness will never let you fail, it will always ensure your well-being. The most precious gift to mankind is indeed - the Gift of Consciousness. By referring to the Upanishads, Bodhisattvas, Bible, and Sufism teachings and stories, Addittya brilliantly reveals a unique perspective on ancient wisdom. Formatted with short insightful chapters that boost positive energy within you, this book is a great motivator for spiritual seekers and meditation practitioners. In this book, you'll learn about: - Beauty of living with consciousness - Importance of turning inwards - Realizing the true source of happiness - Beauty of being you and believing in yourself - Overcoming personal and professional setbacks "Addittya's articles are brilliant with great insights on the importance of consciousness / gratitude. Wonderful and profound! Awesome. Love is the foundation of everything on earth." - Kartic Vaidyanathan, Director, Cognizant"All your writings are powerful Addittya. Thank you for what you do! You truly have a Beautiful gift and I'm so blessed to cross your path." - Stephen Orth, Marketing Head, EcoOasis Eco Development About the Author: Addittya Tamhankar is an internationally acclaimed author, IIM alumnus and vedic astrologer. Based in Pune, he is a spiritual life coach and a visionary motivator. Addittya believes that with deep spiritual practice and meditation the solutions to all our miseries can be found. The solution to our problems is within us - all we need is to 'dive' within, turn inwards and explore our true self. From the last 16 years, Addittya has been consulting and coaching people across the globe. By profession, he is an experienced IT documentation consultant. With over thousands of followers on LinkedIn and Quora, Addittya with his deep spiritual insights continues to motivate people across the globe. His focus is always on 'meditation' - for he believes that it is only meditation that can transform you into a new man. He lives with a strong belief that: "To find the true meaning and purpose of life - the only way is by turning inwards."

Download or read book Wider Than the Sky written by Gerald M. Edelman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Wider Than the Sky presents an analysis of the brain activities underlying consciousness that is based on remarkable recent advances in biochemistry, immunology, medical imaging, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. But the implications of this rewarding book extend farther, well beyond the worlds of science and medicine into virtually every area of human inquiry."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Anaesthesia written by Kate Cole-Adams and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-29 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2017 Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award You know how it is when you go under. The jab, the countdown, the— —and then you wake. This book is about what happens in between. Until a hundred and seventy years ago many people chose death over the ordeal of surgery. Now hundreds of thousands undergo operations every day. Anaesthesia has made it possible. But how much do we really know about what happens to us on the operating table? Can we hear what’s going on around us? Is pain still pain if we are not awake to feel it, or don’t remember it afterwards? How does the unconscious mind deal with the body’s experience of being cut open and ransacked? And how can we help ourselves through it? Haunting, lyrical, sometimes shattering, Anaesthesia leavens science with personal experience to bring an intensely human curiosity to the unknowable realm beyond consciousness. What really happens to us when we are anaesthetised? By this I mean not what happens to the pinging, crackling apparatus of our nerves and spinal cords and brains, but what happens to us—to the person who is me or the person who is you—as doctors go about the messy business of slicing and delving within us? Kate Cole-Adams is a Melbourne writer and journalist. Her non-fiction work Anaesthesia won the Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award, 2017 and the 2017 Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists Media Award. It was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-fiction, 2017. Her novel Walking to the Moon is also published by Text. ‘Anaesthesia is mesmerising...This rich and thorough study looks more deeply into questions about the nature of consciousness than many of us who undergo an anaesthetic are likely, or willing, to ponder.’ Australian Book Review ‘A work of splendid richness and depth, driven by a curiosity so intense that it hazards at times the extreme boundaries of the sayable.’ Helen Garner ‘Kate Cole-Adams has been fascinated with our funny non-being during surgery for a long time, and Anaesthesia feels like a book that’s taken over a decade to write, which it is. It also feels like you’re having a decade’s worth of conversations with a dogged, but generous and resourceful thinker, with someone (she is both a journalist and a novelist) who can crack open a complex idea, and then run with it.’ Readings 'An obsessive, mystical, terrifying, and even phantasmagorical exploration of anesthesia’s shadowy terra incognita.’ The New Yorker 'Remarkable in its attention to historical detail and quality of the primary sources...practising anaesthetists should read what has become the single best account of our profession’s most philosophically fragile constructs—consciousness and self... Cole-Adams has distilled and articulated the art of our profession.’ Anaesthesia Intensive Care journal (published by Australian Society of Anaesthetists) ‘Extraordinarily well-researched and delicately structured, this is a book with few parallels. Exceptional writing illuminates a topic that affects most of us, but that few of us understand.’ Judges’ Report, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, 2018 ‘Comfortably numb. A close-up look at anaesthesia is equal parts social history, popular science and report on experience.’ NZ Listener ‘Anaesthesia is not just an account of medical research but a poetic exploration of the mysteries of the human mind.’ Australian ‘Should be compulsory reading for all anaesthetists, others responsible for the care of surgical patients, and medical students who wish to achieve a true perspective of today’s anaesthesia.’ medicSA ‘Cole-Adams’s prose is sinuous, at times intoxicating, and witty.’ Sydney Morning Herald ‘A troubling, anxious subject that most of us would rather avoid or deflect with dark humour. Cole-Adams has illuminated it in a memorable way. The book is a gift not of oblivion but of awareness.’ Inside Story ‘For the interested reader, it’s an outline of the science, with an emphasis on the unknown. For the practitioner, it’s a patient experience, eloquently expressed. There’s much more the anaesthesia than meets the eye, and this book provides a glimpse into the depths.’ Conversation ‘A fascinating mix of historical background, moving—sometimes shocking—surgical stories, interviews with experts and case studies. Surprisingly, it seems relatively little is really known about exactly how effective and affective anaesthetic is. Despite that, I found this book an oddly reassuring study.’ North and South NZ ‘Kate Cole-Adams has written a book that defies familiar categories. It is a personal memoir, a history, a scientific study, and a philosophical enquiry into the unconscious, and by drawing all these strands together the author has delivered a masterpiece.’ Jamie Grant, head judge, Waverley Council Nib Literary Awards ‘This is a surprising delight of a book about the invention and use of anaesthetics, but it is also about the concept of consciousness. It is a book about the fear of death, the fear of a lack of control, the fear of an imminent operation, the way a life can be plagued by a general feeling of anxiety and how dreams play a part in this.’ Krissy Kneen, Feminist Writers Festival, Favourite Reads of 2017 ‘Kate Cole-Adams’s Anaesthesia propelled me towards new ways of thinking about thinking itself: experience and consciousness and how we make in and make up this world.’ Ashley Hay, Australian, Books of the Year 2017

Download or read book The Unity of Consciousness written by Tim Bayne and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-04 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Unity of Consciousness Tim Bayne draws on philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience in defence of the claim that consciousness is unified. In the first part of the book Bayne develops an account of what it means to say that consciousness is unified. Part II applies this account to a variety of cases - drawn from both normal and pathological forms of experience - in which the unity of consciousness is said to break down. Bayne argues that the unity of consciousness remains intact in each of these cases. Part III explores the implications of the unity of consciousness for theories of consciousness, for the sense of embodiment, and for accounts of the self. In one of the most comprehensive examinations of the topic available, The Unity of Consciousness draws on a wide range of findings within philosophy and the sciences of the mind to construct an account of the unity of consciousness that is both conceptually sophisticated and scientifically informed.

Download or read book Consciousness written by Josh Weisberg and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-11-07 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each of us, right now, is having a unique conscious experience. Nothing is more basic to our lives as thinking beings and nothing, it seems, is better known to us. But the ever-expanding reach of natural science suggests that everything in our world is ultimately physical. The challenge of fitting consciousness into our modern scientific worldview, of taking the subjective “feel” of conscious experience and showing that it is just neural activity in the brain, is among the most intriguing explanatory problems of our times. In this book, Josh Weisberg presents the range of contemporary responses to the philosophical problem of consciousness. The basic philosophical tools of the trade are introduced, including thought experiments featuring Mary the color-deprived super scientist and fearsome philosophical “zombies”. The book then systematically considers the space of philosophical theories of consciousness. Dualist and other “non-reductive” accounts of consciousness hold that we must expand our basic physical ontology to include the intrinsic features of consciousness. Functionalist and identity theories, by contrast, hold that with the right philosophical stage-setting, we can fit consciousness into the standard scientific picture. And “mysterians” hold that any solution to the problem is beyond such small-minded creatures as us. Throughout the book, the complexity of current debates on consciousness is handled in a clear and concise way, providing the reader with a fine introductory guide to the rich philosophical terrain. The work makes an excellent entry point to one of the most exciting areas of study in philosophy and science today.

Download or read book The Nature of Consciousness written by Susan Pockett and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2000-09 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Book Description: Few books about consciousness get to the nitty gritty as quickly as this one. By the end of the preface, the essence of the novel hypothesis that is at the heart of the book is clear. The reader is then taken on a stimulating intellectual journey that ranges from ancient Hindu religious texts to the most up-to-the minute papers in the neuroscience literature as the author supports and defends the hypothesis. If you have any interest at all in the academic field of consciousness studies, don't miss this book!

Download or read book The Mystery of Consciousness written by John R. Searle and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has long been one of the most fundamental problems of philosophy, and it is now, John Searle writes, "the most important problem in the biological sciences": What is consciousness? Is my inner awareness of myself something separate from my body? In what began as a series of essays in The New York Review of Books, John Searle evaluates the positions on consciousness of such well-known scientists and philosophers as Francis Crick, Gerald Edelman, Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers, and Israel Rosenfield. He challenges claims that the mind works like a computer, and that brain functions can be reproduced by computer programs. With a sharp eye for confusion and contradiction, he points out which avenues of current research are most likely to come up with a biological examination of how conscious states are caused by the brain. Only when we understand how the brain works will we solve the mystery of consciousness, and only then will we begin to understand issues ranging from artificial intelligence to our very nature as human beings.

Download or read book Neural Correlates of Consciousness written by Thomas Metzinger and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together an international group of neuroscientists and philosophers who are investigating how the content of subjective experience is correlated with events in the brain. The fundamental methodological problem in consciousness research is the subjectivity of the target phenomenon--the fact that conscious experience, under standard conditions, is always tied to an individual, first-person perspective. The core empirical question is whether and how physical states of the human nervous system can be mapped onto the content of conscious experience. The search for the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) has become a highly active field of investigation in recent years. Methods such as single-cell recording in monkeys and brain imaging and electrophysiology in humans, applied to such phenomena as blindsight, implicit/explicit cognition, and binocular rivalry, have generated a wealth of data. The same period has seen the development of a number of theories about NCC location. This volume brings together the leading experimentalists and theoreticians in the field. Topics include foundational and evolutionary issues, global integration, vision, consciousness and the NMDA receptor complex, neuroimaging, implicit processes, intentionality and phenomenal volition, schizophrenia, social cognition, and the phenomenal self. Contributors Jackie Andrade, Ansgar Beckermann, David J. Chalmers, Francis Crick, Antonio R. Damasio, Gerald M. Edelman, Dominic ffytche, Hans Flohr, N.P. Franks, Vittorio Gallese, Melvyn A. Goodale, Valerie Gray Hardcastle, Beena Khurana, Christof Koch, W.R. Lieb, Erik D. Lumer, Thomas Metzinger, Kelly J. Murphy, Romi Nijhawan, Joëlle Proust, Antti Revonsuo, Gerhard Roth, Thomas Schmidt, Wolf Singer, Giulio Tononi

Download or read book Altered States of Consciousness written by Charles T. Tart and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 589 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Illusion of Conscious Will written by Daniel M. Wegner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-08-11 with total page 725 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism. Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.

Download or read book The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness written by Stanislas Dehaene and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empirical and theoretical foundations of a cognitive neuroscience of consciousness.

Download or read book Consciousness and Experience written by William G. Lycan and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sequel to Lycan's Consciousness (1987) continues the elaboration of his general functionalist theory of consciousness, answers the critics of his earlier work, and expands the range of discussion to deal with the many new issues and arguments that have arisen in the intervening years--an extraordinarily fertile period for the philosophical investigation of consciousness. Lycan not only uses the numerous arguments against materialism, and functionalist theories of mind in particular, to gain a more detailed positive view of the structure of the mind, he also targets the set of really hard problems at the center of the theory of consciousness: subjectivity, qualia, and the felt aspect of experience. The key to his own enlarged and fairly argued position, which he calls the "hegemony of representation," is that there is no more to mind or consciousness than can be accounted for in terms of intentionality, functional organization, and in particular, second-order representation of one's own mental states. A Bradford Book

Download or read book The River of Consciousness written by Oliver Sacks and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a collection of essays that displays Oliver Sacks's passionate engagement with the most compelling ideas of human endeavor: evolution, creativity, memory, time, consciousness, and experience. "Curious, avid and thrillingly fluent." —The New York Times Book Review In the pieces that comprise The River of Consciousness, Dr. Sacks takes on evolution, botany, chemistry, medicine, neuroscience, and the arts, and calls upon his great scientific and creative heroes--above all, Darwin, Freud, and William James. For Sacks, these thinkers were constant companions from an early age. The questions they explored--the meaning of evolution, the roots of creativity, and the nature of consciousness--lie at the heart of science and of this book. The River of Consciousness demonstrates Sacks's unparalleled ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless endeavor to understand what makes us human.

Download or read book Perplexities of Consciousness written by Eric Schwitzgebel and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-01-28 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A philosopher argues that we know little about our own inner lives. Do you dream in color? If you answer Yes, how can you be sure? Before you recount your vivid memory of a dream featuring all the colors of the rainbow, consider that in the 1950s researchers found that most people reported dreaming in black and white. In the 1960s, when most movies were in color and more people had color television sets, the vast majority of reported dreams contained color. The most likely explanation for this, according to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, is not that exposure to black-and-white media made people misremember their dreams. It is that we simply don't know whether or not we dream in color. In Perplexities of Consciousness, Schwitzgebel examines various aspects of inner life (dreams, mental imagery, emotions, and other subjective phenomena) and argues that we know very little about our stream of conscious experience. Drawing broadly from historical and recent philosophy and psychology to examine such topics as visual perspective, and the unreliability of introspection, Schwitzgebel finds us singularly inept in our judgments about conscious experience.

Download or read book Transformations of Consciousness written by Ken Wilber and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on modern research in psychology and psychiatry, as well as the world's great contemplative traditions, this classic presents a model of individual development that embraces both the conventional stages of psychological growth and the higher levels of spiritual development. In nine seminal essays, the authors and three contributors present discussions on the following topics: A full-spectrum model of consciousness, focusing on the self and its journey through the basic structures of matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit Types of psychopathology that emerge at the various levels of spiritual development Misuses and psychiatric complications of meditation practice Pioneering research into the cross-cultural stages of the meditative path A new preface by Ken Wilber, placing this work within his current integral model of consciousness Contributors include the psychiatrist Mark Epstein (author ofThoughts without a Thinkerand several other books on Buddhism and psychology), and the Christian theologian John Chirban.

Download or read book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Julian Jaynes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000-08-15 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry