The Unity of Consciousness: Binding, Integration, and Dissociation

Consciousness has many elements, from sensory experiences such as vision, audition, and bodily sensation, to nonsensory aspects such as volition, emotion, memory, and thought. The apparent unity of these elements is striking; all are presented to us as experiences of a single subject, and all seem to be contained within a unified field of experience. But this apparent unity raises many questions. How do diverse systems in the brain co-operate to produce a unified experience? Are there conditions under which this unity breaks down? Is conscious experience really unified at all? In recent years, these questions have been addressed by researchers in many fields, including, neurophysiologists and computational modellers, neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, and philosophy. With chapters from some of the leading thinkers on consciousness, this is a thought-provoking book that attempts to answer some of the big questions. Contributors include - Chris Frith, David Chalmers, Guilio Tononi, Anne Treisman, Andrew Young, Sydney Shoemaker, Glyn Humphreys, Rodney Cotterill, Zoltan Dienes, Susan Hurley, Randall O'Reilly, Andreas Engel, Pierre Perruchet, Catherine Tallon-Baudry, and Francisco Varela.

Table of Contents:
Foreword Acknowledgements Introduction Part 1: What is unity? 1.1: Timothy Bayne and David J. Chalmers: What is the unity of consciousness? 1.2: Sydney Shoemaker: Consciousness and co-consciousness 1.3: Susan Hurley: Action, the unity of consciousness, and vehicle externalism Part 2: Binding (The mechanisms of unity) 2.1: Anne Treisman: Consciousness and perceptual binding 2.2: Glyn W. Humphreys: Conscious visual representations built from multiple binding processes: evidence from neuropsychology 2.3: Andreas K. Engel: Temporal binding and the neural correlates of consciousness 2.4: Catherine Tallon-Baudry: Oscillatory synchrony as a signature for the unity of visual experience in humans 2.5: Randall C. O'Reilly, Richard Busby, and Rodolfo Soto: Three forms of binding and their neural substrates: Alternatives to temporal synchrony Part 3: Dissociations (when unity breaks down) 3.1: Pierre Perruchet and Annie Vinter: Linking learning and consciousness: The self-organizing consciousness (SOC) Model 3.2: Zoltan Dienes and Josef Perner: Unifying consciousness with explicit knowledge 3.3: Andrew W. Young: Face recognition with and without awareness Part 4: Integration (The emergence of unity) 4.1: Guilio Tononi: Consciousness differentiated and integrated 4.2: Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson: Neural synchrony and the unity of mind: A neurophenomenological perspective 4.3: Rodney Cotterill: Conscious unity, emotion, dreaming, and the solution of the hard problem

Review :
The book may be most useful for illustrating the breadth of approaches applied to the unity of consciousness and the different levels at which the concept can be considered. It offers few solid conclusions but raises many questions. Overall, there is much that is stimulating and thought provoking, and anyone with an interest in consciousness will find something worth reading. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 18