![]() ![]() Our special, unique self-awareness means, he says, that we are not just another ape and he is surprised by how much he is required to defend this position, not just against the “ravings of anti-evolutionists” but against some of his colleagues who, he suggests, “revel in our lowliness” and regard it as a secular humanist’s version of Original Sin. He wants to discover what it is that “elevates the human being above the brute”. ![]() Vilayanur Ramachandran, Director of the Centre for the Brain at the University of California, San Diego, and a great populariser of neuroscience, adopts a quasi-religious starting point. This is a nascent area of investigation for neuroscience and both authors look to history, philosophy and psychology, and expand upon them with evolutionary biology. Self Comes To Mind: Constructing The Conscious Brain by Antonio Damasio (Pantheon) The perennially fascinating question of who and what we human creatures are is the subject of these two books by eminent neuroscientists in their search for the self. The Tell-Tale Brain: Unlocking The Mystery of Human Nature by VS Ramachandran (William Heinemann) ![]()
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