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This book begins with the wonderment expressed by the neurophysiologist Sherrington: “When I turn my gaze skyward I see the flattened dome of the sky and the sun's brilliant disc and a hundred other visible things underneath it. What are the steps which bring this about? A pencil of light from the sun enters the eye and is focussed there on the retina. It gives rise to a change, which in turn travels to the nerve layer at the top of the brain. The whole chain of these events, from the sun to the top of my brain, is physical. Each step is an electrical reaction. But now there succeeds a change wholly unlike any that led up to it, and wholly inexplicable by us. A visual scene presents itself to the mind: I see the dome of the sky and the sun in it, and a hundred other visual things beside. In fact, I perceive a picture of the world around me” (p. 1).
Edelman and Tononi argue that this rendering of the world into subjective experience is ultimately explicable, but only by modern neuroscience. In the process, they take on the daunting tasks of defining and explaining, in the role of newly inspired frontiersmen, a host of issues—memory, thinking, conscious and unconscious experience, the idea of self, mind/body, and, above all, natural selection and its profound shaping of brain function.
The book is beautifully organized, aptly metaphorical, and astonishingly clear, despite its being quite technical in places. The chapters begin with bare-bones précis that can be read together as stand-alone