Michael Bond, consultant
THIS book is yet another attempt to present and explain the mysteries of consciousness for a broad audience. To his credit, J. Kevin O'Regan takes a provocative and fresh approach to a discipline that often seems to be chasing its tail in search of a way forward.
O'Regan is an experimental psychologist best known for his work on vision and perception, in particular for his co-discovery of change blindness - the way people fail to notice what seem like obvious changes in a scene before them. In the past decade he has pioneered a new theory of seeing to explain this and other phenomena and describe why our visual system appears so effective despite its many imperfections. We see the world, he claims, not by piecing together a picture postcard-like representation in the brain, but by interacting with our surroundings and inferring visual knowledge based on our previous experience.
O'Regan begins with an overview of this "sensorimotor" account of vision before applying its principles to the hard problem of consciousness: why sensations feel the way they do. He offers an alternative way of looking at the issue, above all to provide a better method for linking scientific understanding with people's everyday experience. "We should not think of feel as something that happens to us, but rather as a thing that we do," he explains.
Or, I should say, tries to. Though I felt intellectually exercised, in spite of O'Regan's best efforts, I finished the book not much clearer about the nature of consciousness.
Why Red Doesn't Sound Like a Bell: Understanding the feel of consciousness
J. Kevin O'Regan
Oxford University Press