CONSCIOUS HUMOUR

David E. H. Jones. Why Are We Conscious? A Scientist’s Take on Consciousness and Extrasensory Perception.  Pan Stanford, 2017.

David E H Jones who died last July aged 79 was for many years the 'Daedalus' of the New Scientist and Nature. Daedalus was described in his Fortean Times obituary as “the court jester in the palace of science” and he himself described  it as “a region of scientific humour whose appeal lay in its closeness to reality”. (FT 359 p28)
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STAYING CONSCIOUS

Christof Koch. Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. MIT Press, 2012.

Virulent debates about the nature of consciousness have been going on for centuries; and in general three possible answers have been given; the first is that consciousness is a property of brains, perhaps secreted as the liver secretes bile, often called central state materialism.
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FUTURE MINDS

Michio Kaku. The Future of Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance and Empower the Mind. Allen Lane, 2014.

Having explored the outer limits of physics, Michio Kaku now turns to examining the cutting edges of neuroscience. The areas with the most immediate applicability are the various projects to transform the lives of people with quadriplegia and locked-in syndrome, by constructing systems directly linking the brain to computers and hence to a variety of equipment, including cyborg arms.
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CREATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Gary Lachman, Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World. Floris Books, 2013.

This is a cracking book on a cracking subject by a cracking author. Sadly it has a terrible subtitle – ‘Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World’ – which, in its implicit, almost finger-wagging, worthiness might well put you off so much as opening it. Don’t let it do that. Buy or borrow it. And, most importantly, read it.
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BACK FROM THE DEAD

Sam Parnia, with Josh Young. The Lazarus Effect. The Science That Is Erasing the Boundary Between Life and Death. Rider, 2013

This is a book in two parts; the first part is the scientific part, the one that explores the dramatic new breakthroughs in bringing back people from what is traditionally assumed to be death, after much longer periods than used to be thought possible. It was these techniques that lay behind the astonishing survival of the footballer Fabrice Muamba last year, a survival essentially due to the coincidental presence of a leading cardiac consultant in the crowd.
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DEATH AND CONCIOUSNESS

David H Lund. Death and Consciousness. MacFarland and Co, 2011.

A paperback reissue of the 1985 original in which Minnesota philosopher David Lund argues for the possibility of life after death. In the first part he argues for a theory of disembodied survival in a world of images, as envisioned by the English philosopher H. H. Price (not to be confused with Harry Price). This we might now call a virtual world.
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PAST IMPERFECT

Rupert Sheldrake. The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature, 2nd edition. Icon Books, 2011.

My review of the first edition of this book in Magonia 32 (March 1989) was less than enthusiastic to say the least. In the second edition Sheldrake does seem to have made an effort to incorporate more recent scientific findings and ideas and to back-peddle on some of the political and metaphysical speculation, but I doubt that this will make his central thesis any more attractive to the scientific community.
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THE MORALITY OF IMMORTALITY

John Gray. The Immortalization Commission. Allen Lane, 2011.

Charles Darwin's Origin of Species published in 1859 presented a word in which human beings were totally embedded in the general and very mortal biological world, and not a special creation destined for immortality. John Gray explores ways in which human beings have tried to escape that fate and construct a path to immortality founded on science rather than religious revelation.
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LIFE AND SOUL

Nicholas Humphrey. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Quercus, 2011.

One the great mysteries of neuroscience is the so called hard problem of consciousness, just how can patterns of electrical and chemical activity in a brain generate actual experience. It is one which has led a good number of workers in this field to hold up their hands in surrender and argue it is a question which can never be answered.
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ALL IN THE MIND?

Antonio Damasio. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. William Heineman, 2010.

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Oliver Sacks. In the Mind's Eye. Picador, 2010.

Damasio's book is an important and impressive study of the rise of consciousness, and while much of it is of a more technical nature than I am competent to comment on, I want to draw attention to the main theme, consciousness as a product of the brain's interaction with the body.

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BRAIN AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Alva Noe. Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness. Hill and Wang, 2009

If paranormalists, seeing the title of this book, think the author, a professor of Philosophy and member of the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, is going to support their belief that consciousness is some kind of etheric stuff which can float around operating tables, they are going to be disappointed.
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