The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

Overall I loved this book. I'm personally interested in the content. I felt like the pace was great for most of the book and it was geared to a general audience. However, once we got into the thick of the author's field of work it shifted into a faster pace with additional complexity, shifting his audience to his scientific peers. I had a hard time keeping up. I found it ironic that the end of the book we find out - that just how consciousness arises is still an open question!

This is a great book! LeDoux presents a coherent and detailed model of how conscious emotional experience (consciousness) is the product of a hierarchy of brain networks regions with the Frontal Pole acting as the conductor. He does not declare it as a Theory of Consciousness (ToC) but rather as extra constraints to supplement the theory of Higher Order Thought to make it a multistate hierarchical model.LeDoux specifically describes schemas (mental models) in the context of working memory and how these are used in predictive coding and to inform the prefrontal higher-order network. "pattern completion" is the aha moment when prediction/input match the model.LeDoux describes a hierarchy of consciousness consisting of phenomenal, noetic, and auotnoetic consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness is the representation of phenomena in the brain. Noetic consciousness is subjective experience. And...p.372 - "Autonoetic consciousness (the ability to mentally model one's self in relation to time) is the essence of who each of us is, or at least of what we consciously know about ourselves. It is the basis of the conceptions that underlie our greatest achievements as a species—art, music, architecture, literature, science—and our ability to appreciate them."p.231 - "Schema work their magic by taking advantage of the ability of the brain to complete patterns from partial information, a process called pattern completion. For example, the opening phrase of a piece of music is sufficient to bring to mind the overall sound of the song, the genre of music, the artist, where you were when you heard it first, and so on."p.366 - "Recent studies by Lisa Barrett and others have begun to demonstrate the importance of top-down control, predictive coding, and active inference in emotional processing and experience. And, as I have noted previously, the idea that top-down predictions and inferences influence conscious emotions can be viewed as compatible with a higher-order view. For example, in a higher-order account, especially a HOROR account, missing body feedback representations can be thought of as absent lower-order states that are made up for by a top-down nonconscious conceptualization in the form of a mental model/schema."The first half is the deep history part and is well written and interesting, but the real feast of fascinating info begins about 1/2 through.This definitely gave me a much more robust understanding of consciousness.

I very much enjoyed reading this book that traces a connection from the earliest, simplest life forms to the complex cognitive and emotional creatures that are humanity. For me, the tone was spot on. It isn't dumbed down, yet things are explained well enough and with clarity. I've had some prior exposure to these topics but it's been a while and I found this summary of the evolutionary steps leading to our advanced, brain-based nervous systems to be clear and fascinating.A potentially controversial point is the authors' ascription of true emotion exclusively to humans. He doesn't assert this as an incontrovertible fact but as a working theory supported by the available evidence. That seems fair. Those of us with pets might be put off by this suggestion, as he acknowledges, but his argument is merely that there is no rigorous evidence to support the assertion that, say, dogs have the same kind of complex thoughts and feelings that we humans do. It's easy to believe otherwise if you spend time with a loyal, affectionate pooch, to be sure; but the differences in our brains, as the author suggests, may yield very different emotional experiences despite seemingly similar outward manifestations. Environmental cues can produce the same patterns of behavior across species without the same degree of inward, reflective, self-aware contemplation of the meaning of those cues. Behavior may be shaped over a very long, evolutionary time scale by its impact on survival in a way analogous to how it's shaped by reinforcement and punishment over a brief time scale. We really don't know whether other mammals think and feel and contemplate the future in the same ways that humans do and the areas of our brains that seem to be where some of those processes take place are not the same in other mammalian brains as in humans. Prefrontal areas involved in thinking about feelings and assigning them more abstract meaning are pretty much exclusive to our species, he argues. This implies that we have different emotional experiences than other species. I'm not all-in with his argument but I understand its basis and the need for more definitive knowledge to resolve it. In the meantime, his suggestions seem valid.Irrespective of where you may stand on that specific issue, it's likely that you'll learn a lot from this book and find it fascinating. As the author points out, there are continuities between ourselves and the simplest single-cell organisms while, at the same time, there are arguably important cognitive differences between us and our closest biological "relations." It's quite a story.

A reviewer in Nature noted, there is a tradition among scientists of a certain age to step back and write grand, sweeping stories of their discipline. As the reviewer did not note, the success of these late career works is quite mixed.Le Doux’s goal here is to write a grand history of human consciousness from the Big Bang until now. The book begins with a bullet point outline of the formation of galaxies and chemistry, leading eventually to the formation of our planet. If one insists on starting at square 1, I suppose there may be some merit in starting with the Big Bang, but Le Doux does not draw any meaning from early cosmic history that later informs the history of human consciousness. Given the starting point he chose, he missed a big opportunity to tie in early cosmology with the later development of life. We know that cosmic history did produce chemistry that supports life. Astrophysicists ask: was this a fluke – might things have turned out differently, with forms of energy and matter that would not support the complex molecules of life; or is there something deeply inherent in the cosmos that could lead only to a universe with the chemistry we actually have? Since Le Doux chose to start at the Big Bang, this question should at least have been raised. As it is, his narrative is a bit like discussing neolithic agricultural tool making to ensure that your history of the French Revolution is complete.The middle of the book discusses early evolution of life, from the origins of life, the emergence of multicellular organisms, the arrival of vertebrates and neural systems. There are brief references to the abilities of single cell organisms to do some of the things we associate with neural systems: detecting stimuli in the environment, “remembering” them long enough to respond, and then producing behaviours in response. Oddly, however, he missed the best example of this: paramecium, which have been described as “swimming neurons.” That said, I very much enjoyed this review of early evolution.But there the history of evolution ends, once we have vertebrates and neurons. The final third of the book discusses various hypotheses and models of human consciousness. One must always bear in mind that all discussions of consciousness are necessarily closer to philosophy than to neural science. Despite astonishing advances over the past half century, neural science has something to say about the early stages of processing of neural signals, but literally nothing to say about the experience of consciousness. Many wonder whether it ever will.The result is a book about early evolution, and a second book about the cognitive philosophy of consciousness, with no link between them. It soon becomes clear why there is no link. In Le Doux’s view, only humans have consciousness: animals, even higher mammals, do not. Le Doux would probably say, “I never said animals are not conscious, all I said is there is no evidence that they are conscious.” Sure, but the way he makes his argument leaves no possibility that there ever could be such evidence.In my opinion, there is a considerable body of evidence that animals have consciousness; not human consciousness, but something similar. A large body of that evidence lies in the evolutionary history that Le Doux omitted. There are also fMRI studies that show that homologous structures in dog and human brains react similarly to similar stimulus. This is evidence not only of consciousness, but also of emotion in animals. And, observation of animals, including family pets, is a form of evidence, albeit a form that must be assessed carefully and critically. Le Doux openly mocks this kind of evidence. In the end, however, Le Doux imposes a test of certainty that is not required by the scientific method generally, and his much more rigorous than the tests of certainty that Le Doux himself applies in his discussions of human cognition and consciousness.In the end, I do not believe the book is a success, in large part because of Le Doux’s ideological insistence that animals are not conscious and have no emotions. The result is a tale of evolution up to the point where vertebrate animals appear, and then a historical black hole, with human consciousness appearing as if out of thin air.

If the author's aim was to explain how we got conscious minds, I think the 200 pages of the first half (Parts 1 to 8) could have been compressed into 50 pages at most. It starts to feel more like an Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Biology, which is not what I was looking for after having read more than 10 books on the subject. I was expecting something along the lines of 'From Bacteria to Bach and Back' by Daniel Dennett but covering more science and less philosophy.I found the explanation of different theories of consciousness interesting (Higher Order Theory, Global Workspace Theory). The evidence from neuroscience experiments and the author's own research on explicit versus implicit fear was for me the most fascinating part. I plan to read the book again but this time I shall start from the end!

Testo avvincente e stimolante per filosofi, neuroscienziati, antropologi, psicologi, e per chiunque voglia cimentarsi con l'arduo problema della coscienza. Inglese abbordabile. Non mancano le difficoltà dovute alle difficoltà del tema affrontato. Consegna puntuale.

Excellent reading of the Foundation of live and consciousness. His evolution of thinking is honest, great contribution to brain science.

Un délicieux et érudit voyage avec l'auteur dans l'histoire de l'évolution .Pour quelqu'un qui est curieux de savoir comment nous humains sommes arrivés à exister,ce livre est un guide d'unetelle clarté et rigueur !Un vrai plaisir de lecture !