The Hidden Spring
A Journey to the Source of Consciousness
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
'Nobody bewitched by these mysteries can afford to ignore the solution proposed by Mark Solms' - Oliver Burkeman, Guardian
'A remarkable book. It changes everything' - Brian Eno
How does the mind connect to the body? Why does it feel like something to be us? For one of the boldest thinkers in neuroscience, solving this puzzle has been a lifetime's quest. Now at last, the man who discovered the brain mechanism for dreaming appears to have made a breakthrough.
The very idea that a solution is at hand may seem outrageous. Isn't consciousness intangible, beyond the reach of science? Yet Mark Solms shows how misguided fears and suppositions have concealed its true nature. Stick to the medical facts, pay close attention to the eerie testimony of hundreds of neurosurgery patients, and a way past our obstacles reveals itself.
Join Solms on a voyage into the extraordinary realms beyond. More than just a philosophical argument, The Hidden Spring will forever alter how you understand your own experience. There is a secret buried in the brain's ancient foundations: bring it into the light and we fathom all the depths of our being.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"The hard problem of consciousness is said to be the biggest unsolved puzzle of contemporary neuroscience," writes psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist Solms (The Brain and the Inner World) in this wide-ranging survey. Solms answers such questions as how consciousness came to be, what it is, and whether it could be artificially replicated—his theory proposes that consciousness is an evolutionary response to the human organism's need to minimize the energy it expends to meet its physical and psychological needs. Solms rejects cognitive psychologists' theories that consciousness is lodged in the brain's cerebral cortex—it "is far more primitive than that," he writes. To support his theory, Solms provides case studies (he discusses a patient experiencing confabulations in terms of Freud's notions of subjectivity), deep technical dives into the makeup of the human brain, and weaves in entropy and thermodynamics. Solms concludes with a somewhat manically written discussion of the ethics of a conscious machine, complete with a plan for what he'd do if he were able to build one: he'll remove the battery, patent the process, and organize a symposium. His theory is complex, as is his writing (sentences such as "The cholinergic basal forebrain circuits... constrain the reward mechanism of the mesocortal-mesolimbic dopamine circuit in memory retrieval" are common). Still, readers who stay the course will find much to consider.
