The recap
Why does it feel like anything at all to be you? Anil Seth, a neuroscientist who has spent his career studying consciousness, tackles that question by breaking it into parts that experiments can reach: what in the brain explains the particular qualities of experience, the sense of having a body, the feeling of being a self? His central answer is that the brain is a prediction machine. Rather than passively receiving the world, it constantly guesses what is out there and corrects those guesses against incoming signals, so that ordinary perception is a kind of controlled hallucination. More radically, he argues that our deepest sense of self grows out of the brain's work of keeping the living body regulated and alive, which makes us beast machines rather than computers made of meat. Seth writes clearly, drawing on research from his own lab. Consciousness science is young, and his framework is one serious view among several rather than settled fact, but it is a thrilling one, and it changes how you see your own mind.
Why read it
For anyone who has lain awake wondering what a self really is, and for psychology and philosophy fans who want the latest brain science told with clarity and wonder.
Fun facts
- 01
The Economist and Bloomberg named it one of the best books of 2021, and The Guardian and the Financial Times picked it as a best science book of the year.
- 02
It is Seth's first book.
- 03
Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and directs the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science.
- 04
Its core argument is often called the beast machine theory: conscious experience is rooted in the brain's predictions about the world and the body's inner states.
