Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

by Annaka Harris

July 25, 2020

Los Angeles, CA

While the book does not answer what is “conscious,” it approaches the problem with questions and provides interesting concepts and theories regarding the subject along the way. Additionally, it presents interesting examples of experiments and tests that revolve around neuroscience, the mind, and the human brain (which I found more interesting than the actual context or concept of the book).

A few interesting things I learned that I did not know of or are generally dismissed by people: Plants do have memory, reactions, and feelings (we just don’t experience them like we would in other forms of living species), therefore, they are conscious. The concept of an organism having a complex behavior does not solely equate it to being conscious. The closer anything occurs in proximity to your brain the faster you’ll perceive it, your decision to actually react, move, decide or act is instantaneous at the moment and the implementation of a decision cannot be preceded by planning. People should be held accountable by their actions, they did decide on it; unless they’ve been infected, as parasites can alter or heighten our actions, thoughts, dreams, and preferences. Our consciousness is based on experiences as reference points for ideas. Consciousness is integral to matter since that’s what we’re made of.

There is no “present” moment since we constantly keep moving, I found this concept to be the most interesting… what you just read is no longer the present, we keep moving through time that’s been fragmented into very specific millisecond moments. Consciousness is existing in multiple areas within our body in many possible states at once, until it interacts with something specific, this is known as focus. The experiment I found most interesting was the split brain experiment and the question that was on my mind throughout the second half of the book was: “Are our smartphones and smart devices conscious?”