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While you are reading these lines, you change. Your eyes by means of their retinal cells scan the page, the cells detect the lines and dots of what is printed here, react with an outburst of action potentials, which in turn activate layers of cells in the upstream electrical current whose biochemical-electric discharges, after activating even more cells and passing several more relay stations in the backyards of your brain, finally culminate somewhere in the columns of your sensory cortex, and then these impulses and the patterns they produce are interpreted by cell ensembles located in the areas they call “Wernicke” and “Broca” as words that—hopefully—will transform your actual psychic status into one that gives you the impression (again due to another process somewhere else in your brain) that what you are doing makes sense to you. To whom? Consider yourself a conglomerate of interconnecting cells, forming tissues of different kinds, and, especially, nervous tissue. If you are still following me, you can be fairly certain that a sufficient amount of partial processes, all of which are unconscious, have produced what is called a “global brain state” that is a conscious experience—namely, “you” reading what “I,” in a similar state, have written into my PC on a grey October afternoon. Lots of other partial processes in your brain, consisting of neural networks of cell assemblies with reentrant connectivity, dealing with a lot of things that are also important, didn't make it into that brilliant global state you are in now. They are dismissed or “repressed,” for that matter. The result is that at this very moment you are not concerned about the rent you have to pay or your dog that destroyed your neighbor's garden. You feel much more comfortable, I hope, reading this review—actually, you come into existence as the “you” experiencing yourself consuming my thoughts about this book by reading these lines.
As you may assume, and rightly so, I have tried to give you an impr