Free The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning by Daniel Bor

habit, but also highlighted other more frustrating aspects to our collective character. For centuries we have been overly influenced by viewpoints from many quarters defending the intractability of consciousness to science. As this chapter has shown, many modern philosophers have emulated this position, producing a multitude of arguments for why a scientific approach to awareness may be pointless. For much of the history of psychology, even scientists have jumped on this defeatist bandwagon and avoided anything close to the study of consciousness, assuming it was simply unavailable to experimentation. For instance, George Miller, one of the most prominent experimental psychologists of the past century, suggested of consciousness in 1962 that “we should ban the word for a decade or two.”
    Luckily, from about a generation ago, we have also had scientists who shared Leeming’s personality. They cheerfully ignored the cries from their colleagues that consciousness was the most insoluble mystery in the universe, and plowed on with a positive, exploratory attitude—just for the hell of it, to see what they could find. Such stories have been repeated myriad times in the history of science, with unscientific conviction against our ability to understand a topic dissolving into fascinating scientific advance. But this time, the situation is unique; this time, the topic is the very heart of what it is to be human.
    From now on, I’ll be abandoning philosophy. Instead, I’ll focus on the success story of the science of consciousness. I’ll describe how that brave, curious leap into the unknown has produced a cornucopia of fascinating evidence for what consciousness actually is, and how the brain generates our experiences.

2
     
    A Brief History of the Brain
     
    Evolution and the Science of Thought
     

THE FIRST LESSON IN NATURE IS FAILURE
     
    Soon after I started my PhD at Cambridge’s Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in 1998, the director of the department, William Marslen-Wilson, came into my office. A tall man with dark, slightly graying hair and a kindly face, he chatted amiably with me for a few minutes, welcoming me to the department, which I was touched by—aside from the fact that he kept calling me various wrong names (he turns name confusion into an art form). Then, as he turned to go, he paused at the door and, with a whimsical smile, said, “Remember, David, the first lesson in science is failure.” I took little notice of this rather mysterious piece of advice until I carried out my first ill-fated experiment, when, sure enough, my first lesson in science was failure.
    Failures are an inevitable part of the process of doing science. As scientists, we are professionally trying to track the truth. We need to explore many different options in a creative, directed way in order to inch closer to what’s really occurring in nature. Quite a few of those ideas have to be wrong, particularly if you take the scientific community as a whole, with its millions of competing scientists, many with differing views.
    Consider, for instance, that for much of scientific history, it was believed that the universe was bathed in an amorphous substance known as the ether . Even by the end of the nineteenth century there was near universal acceptance of the idea of a “luminiferous ether,” a medium to support the transmission of light waves across the vast expanses of space. Around the turn of the twentieth century, meticulous experiments carried out by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, along with theoretical work by Albert Einstein, made this notion of a ubiquitous supporting substance untenable, and we now see “luminiferous ether” as a quaint, extinct theory.
    In fact, calling long-rejected scientific theories “extinct” is a more apt metaphor than it might superficially appear. The similarities between the scientific method and biological evolution are surprisingly close because of the