Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness

Indeed, sensation lends a hereness, a nowness, a me-ness to the experience of the present moment, such as seeing red. It constructs our world. In the book Nicholas Humphrey describes ''re-entrant sensation circuits'' in the brain, neural activity that loops back on itself, so as to create self-resonance. Sensory response circuits that have evolved to give a new level of mind sophistication. The creation of a thickening time of core consciousness. According to Humphrey: With these circuits, the subject is lifted out of zombiedom. Now with a self - a human being that has a life worth pursuing. Something to build a rich subjective life around. By putting sensation on the production side of the mind rather than the reception side, we get a whole new life. All brilliant described by Humphrey in this small, but wonderful book. -Simon

This book provides a clear and simple description of phenomena that are often described as qualia, and a good guess about how and why they might have evolved as convenient ways for one part of a brain to get useful information from other parts. It uses examples of blindsight to clarify the difference between using sensory input and being aware of that input. I liked the description of consciousness as being "temporally thick" rather than being about an instantaneous "now", suggesting that it includes pieces of short-term memory and possibly predictions about the next few seconds. The book won't stop people from claiming that there's still something mysterious about qualia, but it will make it hard for them to claim that they have a well-posed question that hasn't been answered. It avoids most debates over meanings of words by usually sticking to simpler and less controversial words than qualia, and only using the word consciousness in ways that are relatively uncontroversial. The book is short and readable, yet the important parts of it are concise enough that it could be adequately expressed in a shorter essay.

Though I will read a book of any length, I must admit to a fondness for short ones. Particularly if they are bursting with ideas that make me stop and think on virtually every page. This book clearly falls into that category. Seeing Red is based on a series of lectures at Harvard University, and, as with all his other books, it is written in a simple and direct style. Humphrey begins by asking his audience to look at an expanse of red. If it is convenient, you might want to take a moment away from reading this to join in with the experiment. Simply look at something red for a moment. Then comes the first question: What does it mean to see red? We can measure the light and the mixture of wavelengths, but actually seeing red is a subjective experience. So this first and apparently simple question brings us straight to the heart of the great mystery: consciousness itself. Despite millennia of philosophies, experimentation and now the advent of sophisticated methods for peering into the brain of conscious individual, we are still face with the "hard problem:" how do three pounds of physical matter with the consistency of thick oatmeal, give rise to self-awareness, the works of Mozart and Shakespeare, and the insights of Einstein and the Dalai Lama? Seeing Red is a synthesis and summing up of much of Nick's earlier work, much of which is provocative and controversial, but also brilliant and insightful. The high school theory of vision, still being taught today, is that first we receive photons that strike the rods and cones in the retina, which in turn generate visual sensations. We then use those sensations to perceive objects in the external world. From the outset, Nick tells us that this is completely wrong. Instead he claims that sensation and perception are independent mental processes that occur in parallel instead of in a series or sequence of events. He goes on to say that sensation and perception originally evolved for different functions. Part of his reasoning is derived from the strange and intriguing phenomenon of blindsight. There are people who have sustained damage to the visual cortex and are unable to see anything in part of their visual field, yet they can still make visual discriminations. This implies that they seem to have perception without sensation. This leads to the next question: if conscious sensations are independent of perception why do we need them at all? The heart of the theory outlined in this book is that when we see the color red, it is not a process of passively receiving impressions or of building up internal images. It is an active participatory process that he calls redding. Why this is so different from the standard model is that it means that sensation is an active productive activity of the brain, rather than passive reception. This idea has been discussed in psychology and neuroscience for several years, but rarely as clearly as in this book. For anyone interested in consciousness and the developm

Seeing Red is a truly spectacular book - the format is creative and the scope is ambititous yet not esoteric - Humphrey urges the reader to engage with him in an epoché of sorts and simulates a Harvard lecture written in a conversational style and clever graphics. The author successfuly translates his professorial élan into the book and the reader feels invited into the discussion. It is a genuine effort to fuse neuroscience, art, philosophy and literature to come up with a transparent theory of consciousness - no mean feat! The book's potential really lies its ability to stimulate reflection about consciousness in light of recent evidence and ancient conjecture delivered seamlessly.

This is a collection of fun and fascinating lectures about the philosophical and neurological implications of the act of simply seeing the color red (or another color, if you prefer). If you're the kind of person like me who gets off on defining the difference between perception and sensation, you'll love it. Plus it's short and appealingly designed.