How can you survey the route of a high-speed train while confined within the train itself? This is the essential dilemma for neurobiologists looking for consciousness in the brain. Our tool for exploration is the very thing we study.

To address this essential limitation, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness takes a circuitous route, circling around ways of examining consciousness. House uses a variety of mechanisms to approach its subject—stories, metaphors, experiments. Each loop brings us closer to another understanding of consciousness. By turns poetic, philosophical, and humorous, it is always thought-provoking.

Some of my favorite ways were near the end — the sense of consciousness as sculptor and sculpture, for example. This is a book to read slowly and cogitate on.

House's 19 essays are interesting, full of humor, and nothing like what I expected. The pretense of this book and the ways House looks at consciousness are worth the read, but be warned that this isn't a typical look at the ways the human brain functions or how humans think.
I have recommended this work to others that are interested in look at things from different perspectives.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this dARC in exchange for my honest review.

Interesting/makes you think: 5/5 stars
This has definitely fundamentally altered the way I think about consciousness and the human brain, and raised a lot of questions I’m looking forward to continuing to explore and think about.

Readability: 2.5/5 stars
It’s not the most well-written book and can just feel a bit confusing at times. Like I had to deconstruct the sentences to understand exactly what was happening. But it wasn’t impossible, and ultimately felt worth it.

How much I trust the facts and takeaways: 3.5/5 stars
The author clearly has deep knowledge of neuroscience and philosophy, and the range of sources, from scientific papers to personal interviews with thought leaders was impressive. I’m not sure if it’s their fault or just my own lack of knowledge of neuroscience, but there were more than a few places where I was like, “huh. I’m not sure about that, I want to dig into that primary source a bit more to see what it says.” Which isn’t a bad thing necessarily. Like I said, this is the type of book that raises a lot of questions for me, and I think most of them are either difficult to answer or actually unknowable, but there’s still value in thinking about them.

Honestly, I thought this book would be an easier read. maybe I requested it on NetGalley because I was in the mood to learn more about myself and the people around me. Whatever the reason, this book is full of interesting suggestions about consciousness based on a girl who suffers from epilepsy and doctors attempting to prevent seizures through her brain tissue.

A variety of comparisons about the world around us and the possibilities of how our brain works and functions are suggested here. Parts of it relates to evolution without mention of creation, a huge turn off for me personally. this made it difficult for me to keep reading, but I pushed through to learn what else this author relates our consciousness to.

Overall, this is an interesting collection of observations and comparisons to the world around us. Each chapter is fairly short and not extremely complicated in the thought process. It has shown me that I should probably stick to fiction stories because this was a lot to take in for leisure reading.

I give this book 4 out of 5 tiaras because there’s no mention of creation whatsoever. I believe our brain functions as it does because of our Creator God, not because of evolution. Without even a mention of this as a possibility is a huge turn off for me.

This book offers a variety of interesting explanations of consciousness. I found the author's ideas interesting, and enjoyed how he tied them together in the last chapter. However, I was left frustrated by how little we really understand consciousness. I would've loved for more scientific studies to be included in the book, but as the author notes, we know much more about the physical properties of the brain than the mechanisms of consciousness. This is a good introductory read for those with an interest in neuroscience, consciousness, and even quantum theory.

The opening two chapters were compelling, but unfortunately I didn't make it very far into this book. So a DNF for me.

Philosophy of the mind has always been one of my favourite realms of philosophy. I love thinking about how we think. About why we think. Consciousness, sentience, intelligence—how did these traits evolve? How do they even work? Patrick House explores Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness (literally what it says on the tin) and tries to address these questions. As he admits in the introduction, he doesn’t have all the answers—none of us do—but he has a lot of fun mulling over some of the theories that are out there. However, I didn’t have as much fun reading this book.

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for providing the eARC!

I’m not going to attempt to summarize the nineteen ways. Some of them are a little out there, a little difficult for me to conceptualize let alone express. Basically, each chapter is a different way of explaining or examining consciousness. In all of these chapters, House relates these ideas back to a single study, published in Nature, in which electric current applied to a teenage girl’s brain during surgery stimulated laughter. He tries to apply elements of the chapter’s theory or lens for viewing consciousness to the study to see what we might learn.

Something I loved from the beginning of this book is House’s enthusiasm for and wonder about consciousness. He states that neuroscience is at a stage right now similar to how physics was, say, four hundred years ago. I thought that was a really interesting and apt analogy. Despite all our scientific progress in the last century or so, we really have so far to go in our understanding of the brain—and I’m not talking about that myth that we only use ten percent of it! If you stop and think about it, as House points out in his introduction, it’s wild that non-living matter (amino acids) can somehow come together to form life, and that in turn, we are somehow conscious and actually give birth to other organisms that develop their own, distinct consciousness.

So in this respect, House does a great job at communicating his appreciation for diverse views on consciousness. Each chapter reads in some ways like a revelation, and I think many readers will appreciate how he unpacks these various ideas and challenges us to think about consciousness differently.

Unfortunately, I think my expectations for the book weren’t aligned with what this book actually is. I was hoping for a book that was grounded a bit more in scientific theories, whereas House gives us a lot of philosophy. While the theories House has chosen to present here are all grounded in some type of scientific research, this book is less about explaining the whys and hows of that research and more about describing the consequent theory in a very poetic way. Like I said, I don’t mind philosophy—it just isn’t what I was expecting here.

I don’t want to damn this book with faint praise, because I really do think there is an audience out there for it. This book just wasn’t right for me at this time.

This book combines science, philosophy, and poetry in an exploration of the nature of consciousness. Easy to read and understand, it offers more questions than answers.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

A fascinating, multi-layered look at the “hard” problem of consciousness, which this reader found totally and absolutely mesmerizing. (My own consciousness working hard to keep up, expanding with the extraordinarily-sweeping insights of this author).

Taking an unusual approach, the author, a neuroscientist, considers one true-to-life scenario - the stimulation of a patients brain during surgery with an electric wand, and the sudden invocation of not only laughter, but the accompanying feeling of joy and mirth.

As our patient, Anna, laughs, the author provides nineteen different views, that in some cases encompass aspects of the “what ” has happened (the “easy” problem in the brain, which has to do with neurons and their sparked electrical charges in brain-specific areas), but also touches on the “why” - which is an infinitely more interesting problem.

What is it, this generated feeling, sense of self, and awareness that we call consciousness, and where does it come from? Does it have a physical substrate in the brain (and if so, where is it located?). If it is not physically rooted, is it but a simulation, or an imagined story told by the brain to aid in the efficient use of its resources? A side effect of a volume of intelligent brain activity or simply the movement of thoughts, generated as the brain predicts and plans enormous configurations of possibilities.

Exhuastively and brilliantly detailed, the author provides a sweeping look at life, beginning with development from single cells to bordered multi-celled organisms, relying on proton-pumps and the magic of bio-chemistry to power individual cells. This development paves the way for all biological development, from cell respiration, to ATP production, to the eventual development of the action potential (electric charge) that allows a single neuron to direct an external muscle cell, or a group of firing neurons to activate an entire preprogrammed sequence of coordinated movements or thoughts in the brain.

In various scenarios, the author explains (metaphorically and beautifully capturing complex scientific scenarios) this orchestration by the brain, which ties together all living creatures, as we are all built of the same stuff - yet only some of which could be called conscious.

A question that, at the end of the day, may actually not be answerable - for can we really determine what consciousness is through the efforts of consciousness itself? (Mathematicians would say not).

(Perhaps most fascinating of all is the foray into microtubules and the mysteries of quantum mechanics - which no-one really understands, and so may form the best foundation of all to eventually “solve” this profoundly-indeterminate puzzle.)

I loved this book - found the questions it raised mind-altering, and the explanations provided wonderful and illuminating food for thought.

A great big thank you to Netgalley, the author, and the publisher for an ARC of this book.
All thoughts presented are my own.

I gained a lot of insight from this book on the working of the mind.
I highly recommend reading this book.

I received an advance copy of this title from the publisher.

I managed to expect something other than the book I received, despite the author and publisher telling me exactly what they were giving me, so I'll state it more directly here: this isn't a cohesive book about how to look at consciousness, but nineteen essentially separate essays about how curious it is to look at consciousness, no matter *how* you look at it.

You won't be reading a popular science book that gives an overview of the subject of consciousness and which makes you feel better informed about the subject. The subject of consciousness is a WILD one, full of contradictions and paradoxes. This is a book exploring the questions about consciousness, not providing answers.

That being said, I wished the chapters were longer and the essays more fleshed out.--I wanted more details on the questions being asked. But I think that also means that the questions hooked me as written, so...let's just say your mileage may vary. I found each chapter an appetite whetter rather than a full meal. The last chapter, tying everything together, was a bit weak at first (I don't really need all the chapter names listed!), but ended very well, identifying a core question about consciousness in a unique way.

This book didn't do what I stubbornly expected it to do, but it did ask lots of very nice questions in the pursuit of looking at consciousness, as promised. A solid book, despite being a lot of odd, loose, short essays.

Recommended if you like Oliver Sacks, of course, and are interested in All Things Perception & Consciousness. Not recommended if you want a straightforward overview :)

Entertaining and accessible. A recommended purchase for collection where psychology and pop science books are popular.

Entertaining and accessible. A recommended purchase for collection where psychology and pop science books are popular.

<b>The Median Price of a Thrift-Store Bin of Evolutionary Hacks Russian-Dolled into a Watery, Salty Piñata We Call A Head</b>

If that chapter title alone doesn’t intrigue you, you probably shouldn’t bother with this book. And if you’re looking for a detailed scientific exploration of how the brain works, read Sapolsky’s [book:Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst|31170723] instead. But if you’re looking for unusual, thought-provoking, almost poetical musings about what consciousness is, then this is definitely the book for you.

House takes a unique approach to his topic, inspired by a book of translations of a Chinese poem. (Many very different translations, each capturing a different part of the essence of the original.)

He takes one single phenomenon - the ability to make someone laugh by stimulating specific parts of their brain - and then looks at what’s going on in nineteen different ways, presenting different theories of consciousness. The result is not a coherent, homogenous explanation of consciousness. On the contrary, it’s messy, sometimes contradictory, and occasionally confusing. But that’s what makes this book so illuminating. The truth is, we don’t really know how the brain works, how we think, or what consciousness is. We have a lot of ideas which are partially right (to the best of our knowledge, but they will almost certainly be proved wrong at some point), but we don’t actually have any definitive answers.

House makes us think about these different perspectives on consciousness. What’s the difference between human thought and AI? What can human brains teach us about AI, and what can AI teach us about human brains? What’s biological in origin, what’s electrical, and what’s social? What do we mean by self? Or reality, come to that? These are all valid discussions, sometimes covering the same ground, but often offering unique insights into who we are as individuals and as a species.

It's a fairly quick, easy read. It's not too heavy on the science, and it's written with humor. I'd recommend reading a chapter a day, then putting it aside to consider how to assimilate that with everything that's gone before.

<i>I received a free copy from the publisher in return for an honest review.</i>

Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness by Patrick House is a new book about what consciousness is.
In this book, House writes 19 essays about consciousness. He discusses how it works and how little we know. Most of these essays have analogies, such as comparing consciousness to a pinball machine.
I found this book interesting. There is a lot of information, and House clearly did a lot of research. There is also a lot of information not connected to consciousness, for example, in the pinball chapter he goes over the entire history of the pinball machine.
Unfortunately, this also got annoying after a while. I think these tangents were long winded at times, and it felt like a significant amount of these essays were about developing the analogy, rather than focusing on the actual subject matter. Also, most of the essays mention a girl called Anna, who laughed during a procedure because a part of her brain got shocked. I understand that this was a breakthrough, an important development, but I wish it was mentioned less and other experiments mentioned more. Lastly, many of the chapters were harder to read. House says that he tried to make this book as understandable as possible, and sometimes he succeeded. But there were many parts that went over my head.
I would recommend this book to people who learn best through analogies, and who have a little knowledge of neuroscience already.

Nineteen ways of Looking at Consciousness is a difficult book for me to rate. I had originally hoped that Patrick House might shed some light on my understanding of consciousness, but that's not what this book is meant to do. He does a good job of writing about something that can't be defined by science and that he and other scientists don't fully understand. In one of the first essays, he writes about a case in which a woman was undergoing brain surgery for epilepsy. At one point, the surgeons touched a part of the brain that made her laugh. What does this mean? I don't know, but House returns to this several times. In other essays, he compares consciousness to a pinball machine, and in another one, he compares it to a bowl with 86 billion fish. I think the book might be better appreciated by a different audience, one with more knowledge of neurology, philosophy, and maybe imagination about the possibilities of consciousness than I possess.

Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book.

Interesting topic, but right from the start I found this book a bit hard to fathom as a non-scientific reader. I suspect it’s a lack of imagination on my part. The author states in the introduction that he spent years researching a parasite that infects mice and occasionally causes them to become slightly less averse to cat urine. I spent the next chapters stuck there, wondering how and why one comes to dedicate a significant portion of one’s life to such an inquiry. I spent most of my time with this book feeling perplexed by similar questions. That said, I can imagine a significant readership for this book among a more scientifically literate audience.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing a copy of this book.

Fascinating reflections on consciousness from a variety of perspectives. Definitely a source of many a-ha moments and provocative questions in my consciousness.