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Full Title: wider than the sky - the phenomenal gift of consciousness by Gerald M. Edelman - winner of the Nobel Prize

Rating: 3/5

Writing Style: Academic, but very well done.

Summary: ‘… he explains neuroscience and describes how consciousness arises in complex brains.’

Comments: I learned many points from this book and it is very will presented, so I should have given it the 5/5 rating it deserves, but I just don’t agree with some of his theory ideas and I was hoping for more thoughts on ‘why’ not just’ how’ the brain does what it does. 

The book mentions the mind’s tendency to avoid a fractured reality; anosognosia, blind spot, somatoparaphrenia, alien hand syndrome, etc… So could this make it possible, but not likely, that we all have a few more reality fractures in place that our mind auto-adjusts to form a unitary remembered present reality?

Here are the books notes for memory -> ‘… looked on as a property of degenerate nonlinear interactions in a multidimensional network of neuronal groups.’

But overall this was a great book to read for basic entry to the nuerosciences. I’ll search for his other brain books, as I can only hope he has looked into brain scans and neurons to explain NDE’s, lucid dreams, psychedelics, and more of the fringe consciousness topics.

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