Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience
About the author
Michael Graziano (1967-) is an American scientist, novelist, and composer. He was born in Connecticut and grew up partly on a farm in upstate New York. He is now a professor of neuroscience at Princeton University. He has published numerous novels, some under a pseudonym, scientific books on the brain, and books of music. His novels often take the form of parables or metaphors - fairy tales for the modern adult.
I am reminded of David Foster Wallace who of all of his works a single quote has stuck to my mind like a hot summer piece of bubble gum on the pavement. IT goes like this: There´s a fish passing by two other fishes and the first fish asks them how’s the water? and the other fish promptly ignore the first fish and after a few moments, one of them asks the accompanying fish what the heck is water?
I suppose am a sucker for anything that has the word consciousness in it. I think it all started when I was becoming a chemical dependency counselor way back in the 90s in San Diego Califaztlán proper. I got a big fancy book that was required reading for the course and in it there was a chapter of the brain on how the brain reacted and worked with drugs. I was hooked ever since on the brain and its particulars and have tried to transmit the info with very poor success but accrued great joy joy in doing so since synapses look like two bits are making out. I readily admit this book was some sort of cyberpunk literature since it has a few chapters about uploading the brain to a computer. Eitherwho´s it is the concept of Attention Schemata which managed to draw my attention. Those are two concepts by the way. Attention and Schemata. If you are to understand attention schemata then you need to read them as two different concepts if you wanna play in that playground. I got interested in it mostly because as an educator or employed as such one and working in a municipal school in Sweden, it is often brought to my attention cases where there is a misconception of a lack of attention on the part of a student. The schism being that the student doesn’t have the required form of attention needed to function in an old age school form such as ours. Traditional form of teaching requires loads of concentration which in our case, calls for massive amounts of attention, and if you don’t have it, the medical community that is leaned on to understand such cases deems it or calls it attention deficit. I think that it is established somehow that that is not the case anymore but rather that student has a selective form of attention which is very specific and specialized if you will. It is quite an interesting book if you like that sort of subjects.
85 Han clachado