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

by Annaka Harris

In his book The Master and His Emissary, about the two hemispheres of the brain, the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist describes his intriguing thesis about the possibility that consciousness originates much deeper in the structures of the brain than scientists typically believe: It seems to me more fruitful to think of consciousness not as something with sharp edges that is suddenly arrived at once one reaches the very top of mental functioning, but as a process that is gradual, rather than all-or-nothing, and begins low down in the brain. . . . The problem then becomes not how two wills can become one unified consciousness, but how one field of consciousness can accommodate two wills. . . . Consciousness is not a bird, as it often seems to be in the literature—hovering, detached, coming in at the top level and alighting on the brain somewhere in the frontal lobes—but a tree, its roots deep inside us.19