How do molecules, cells, neurotransmitters, and other brain “stuff” create the abstract experience of self-awareness? Despite massive breakthroughs in the field of neuroscience over the last century, this question continues to baffle both scientists and philosophers.
In his new book, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2018), Michael Gazzaniga, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and director of the university’s SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind, examines what he refers to as this “problem of consciousness.”