Life of Brain

This book is about everything that goes on in your conscious experience: sensations, perceptions, feelings, thoughts, imagination, plans, expectations. It’s also about your conscious experience of self, the sense that there is a YOU behind everything, a YOU that is having all these experiences, a YOU that seems to control all those activities of the mind.

Some of the questions it explores:

- What is conscious experience?

- How did it evolve?

- Why did it evolve?

- How does it develop in the young child?

- What can we do with it?

- Why might it cause us problems?

- Why is it still a mystery?

This book is NOT about the neurological landscape and its functions studied by the neuroscientist armed with the latest fMRI technology (which incidentally measures brain activity indirectly through the flow of blood in response to different tasks). You don’t have to know brain anatomy, you don’t have to tell your hippocampus from your hypothalamus.

This book will be of interest to YOU if you have ever wondered about the nature of conscious experience and the workings of your own consciousness. It may well tell you more about YOU than any other book you have ever read.

Students of psychology, philosophy and evolution will find it of particular relevance to their areas of inquiry.

Ray Fuller taught psychology for 40 years at Trinity College, Dublin. He has published extensively on human risk-taking although he did venture briefly into the psychology of humour, appearing in a line-up with the comedian Ken Dodd at the first-ever international conference on humour. Now retired from academic life, he lives in SW France where he builds stone walls, makes furniture, the odd short film and enjoys writing in prose as well as verse.