groghound 2008-09-10

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

I'm not surprised to see mixed reviews for this book because it's as close to 'real science' as such books get. It's definitely not the compendium of gee whiz human cognition observations and not the philosophical musings that the audience for consciousness books seems to lust after. Re the philosophical side of things, I sometimes imagine that a certain proportion of the audience hopes we never figure out what consciousness is, because that would bring an end to that opium-like haze around the topic to which many are addicted.

But as a science teacher of the subject, I loved it. Challenging to read if you're not already versed in the anatomy of the visual cortex, absolutely. But worth plowing through, absolutely.

Crick was definitely correct that the visual cortex is key to what consciousness is about. He provides an in-depth review of what was known at the time about visuocortical organization and how it relates to human behavior. That body of knowledge was extremely spotty (is spotty still), which means a whole lot of loose ends. That's unsatisfying in a way, but hardly Crick's fault.

Strongly recommended.

J. Patterson 2008-08-27

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

The evidence that his arguments are littered with fallacious arguments is overwhelming, just in the first few pages - which is admittedly all I read. If you are an atheist, Darwinian, naturalist, guess what!? We don't have any souls! Imagine that! The only thing astonishing is that this was published, but I forget, he won a Nobel prize, so he could write "poop" on a piece of toilet paper and get it published. At least that would be less harmful to the public's opinion of the interaction of science and God.

Lawrence N. Goeller 2008-01-17

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

What do you do with your life if you are absolutely brilliant? As Crick says in his earlier book "What Mad Pursuit," he goes off and finds interesting problems to work on. He decided long ago that the two most interesting areas of science are the interface between non-living and living matter -- thus leading to his work on DNA -- and the interface between the brain and the mind. This work summarizes his efforts on the latter problem.

He approaches the problem as a brilliant amateur, one with the talent and reputation to be allowed into the field without having spent his entire youth preparing for it. He then spends a few years working with some of the best in the world, and then tells us what he learned. In this way, he is sort of a stand-in for those of us who would love to do the same thing, if we were only smarter, independently wealthy, and had a Nobel Prize. That is, it is sort of like George Plimpton's "The Paper Lion," the classic book by a sportswriter who goes "undercover" as a draft pick for an NFL team in the 1960's to tell us what it is like.

While the concept is great, the results are disappointing. What I got out of his experience is that the mind/brain problem is really, really hard. Even the great Francis Crick was not able to achieve a double-helix-like breakthrough. The reading itself is tough going, and in the end I find I am glad that Crick spent the time to do this so that I don't have to (or rather, I can stop fantasizing about doing it). I learned a lot about what we know about the brain and how we study it, but as far as I can tell the "astonishing hypothesis" remains unproven.

Dick Marti 2007-09-14

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

This was a boring and tedious book and I was glad to be done with it. It was very disappointing, as it was basically a rehash of psychology experiments involving vision, with some basic neurobiology thrown in as background. While it is well written, it goes nowhere. There is very little mention of a "soul" until chapter 18, and there is, of course, no mention of a scientific search for it, or research on it. There cannot be. It pains me to think that Crick spent years on this endeavor. The answer he seeks will come only after a long and arduous study of all aspects of the brain, its anatomy and function, as well as that of the neurons that constitute it. While I agree with Crick in what he is trying to show---that the "I" that is each of us, is the activity of neurons. How to demonstrate this is the problem. Instead of working backwards from behavior to structure, it would be more fruitful to begin with DNA---the genes that determine brain structure, from the neurons to the brain's gross anatomy, and try to reach an explanation of behavior based on the molecular biology of the brain. However, the human brain may be too complex and the problem thus too intractable. Start with something simple, a flatworm perhaps, and work up from there.

B. Walker 2007-04-28

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

I love the part at the very end where Dr. Crick serves some delicious food for thought, making one think, "Gee whiz, maybe these archaic superstitions known as 'The World's Religions' are not based on any logic."