How Many People Are There in My Head? And in Hers?: An Exploration of Single Cell Consciousness

click here for more details, find new or used items	Jonathan C.W. Edwards Our price £11.84 (£17.95) New from £11.78 Used from £4.91 Pages: 222 (Paperback) ISBN: 1845400720 Pub: Imprint Academic Pub date: 2006-07-25 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 502275

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If you are wondering why creativity in science and the arts has evaporated in recent years; if you are weary of the mind/brain problem taking a jaunt up blind alleyways, and if you are willing to suspend your intuitive disbelief - read this book. It is a story about our inner stories. Edwards meticulously peels back layer upon layer to show how awareness can *only* be attributed to a single cell, and that there is no central self. This involves physics - but not physics as it is usually understood. If this sounds dry, or daunting because you have no training in physics, do not be put off.


Edwards elucidates how even a single celled organism like *Paramecium* can be seen to 'be aware', and explores the idea that through evolution the neurone has decoupled itself from movement to gain complexity of experience by being part of an interdependent colony of cells in the brain. To be aware, and to be able to link things like 'yellowness', 'cheese' and the taste of 'cheddarness', the neurone needs access to information in a unified way. For this, something must unify the cell itself, the most likely candidate being a quantised oscillation: a wave. In integrating the foregoing, Edwards argues that it is dislocations in the language of physics that obstruct the study of consciousness and challenges colleagues to re-define how they speak.

I suspect that Edwards' ideas may be some of the most important of the
21stCentury. In the way that the ideas of Galileo and Darwin did, they have the potential to change the way we look at everything. Written in the first person in conversational tone, this book is peppered with humour and is renaissance in scope. The use of acronyms is an annoying but necessary distraction against a text that is richly sourced and constantly draws upon the author's experiences as doctor, immunologist, and art historian. He damns with faint praise those of his colleagues whose brilliance blinds them to the obvious. Yet if at times a tad imperious, I am left with the sense that this is a *benign* cynic, who is not without compassion for those of us who sometimes cannot quite see.

*Nina Newton, BA(Hons), MA, Dip Psych, C Psych, PhD, MBBS, MRCS*

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