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Out of Our Heads

You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness

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Out of Our Heads

By: Alva Noe
Narrated by: Jay Snyder
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About this listen

 Alva Noë is one of a new breed - part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part neuroscientist - who are radically altering the study of consciousness by asking difficult questions and pointing out obvious flaws in the current science. In Out of Our Heads, he restates and reexamines the problem of consciousness, and then proposes a startling solution: Do away with the 200-year-old paradigm that places consciousness within the confines of the brain. Our culture is obsessed with the brain - how it perceives; how it remembers; how it determines our intelligence, our morality, our likes and our dislikes. It's widely believed that consciousness itself, that Holy Grail of science and philosophy, will soon be given a neural explanation. And yet, after decades of research, only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious - how it gives rise to sensation, feeling, and subjectivity - has emerged unchallenged: We don't have a clue.

In this inventive work, Noë suggests that rather than being something that happens inside us, consciousness is something we do. Debunking an outmoded philosophy that holds the scientific study of consciousness captive, Out of Our Heads is a fresh attempt at understanding our minds and how we interact with the world around us.

©2009 Alva Noe (P)2009 Audible, Inc. Biological Sciences Brain & Nervous System Consciousness & Thought Neuroscience & Neuropsychology Philosophy Physical Illness & Disease Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Science

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Critic reviews

"Readers interested in how science can intersect with and profit from philosophy will find much food for thought in Noë's groundbreaking study." ( Publishers Weekly)
"[A]n invaluable contribution to cognitive science and the branch of self-reflective philosophy extending back to Descartes' famous maxim, 'I think, therefore I am.'" ( Booklist)
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Noë presents his and other people's research very clearly and makes a good case for studying consciousness in the wider context of our action in the world with others. The one downside is that the narrator consistently mispronounces 'causal' as 'casual'.

Compelling and accessible

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The narrator seems not to know that ‘causal’ is a different word to ‘casual’. This makes some of the sections exceptionally confusing. There are other misreading errors: ‘traveller, there is no pain, you make the path by walking it’. Also physical and psychical mean different things. It’s a really great book but I spent too long having to pause and reverse engineer from what was said to what I think the author intended….

Proof reading?

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I am having trouble finishing this book, so I know my review can be shot down in flames! In fact I'm pretty sure I'm going to return it unfinished.
Firstly its style is so convoluted and heavy going that it is boring, hard to follow and unrewarding. This isn't helped by a narrator who reads as if every sentence has an exclamation mark after it, as though the writer is forever amazed by what he has written. He uses little homely happenings or poorly described neuroscience experiments and then builds on them far in excess of what they can actually support - he just sort of riffs off, with no care whether the starting point actually justifies his conclusions.

Closely related is that the substance is nonsense - not wrong, just obvious and years out of date. No-one nowadays is suggesting that consciousness is exactly caused by and is the same as brain states.

I did wonder whether I had completely missed the point - I'm not a professional neuroscientist or philosopher - I'm a psychiatrist with a keen interest in consciousness/mind body problem etc. However, having read authors such as Daniel Dennett (Consciousness explained) and Mind, Meaning and Mental Disorder (Bolton and Hill) provide such rigorous, closely reasoned and ultimately much more readable/listenable works on similar topics, I don't think I have missed the point. Another couple of reviews seem to closely mirror my conclusions.

done so much better by other writers

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