General Resources
Here you will find some useful, interesting, and inspiring resources to support your understanding as you read through the textbook:
- A conversation between Sue and Emily about the book. Find out where the original idea came from; the first and second editions, which Sue wrote alone; why Emily joined her for the third edition; what it’s like collaborating with your daughter/mother; and how we hope you, our reader, will use the book
- Sue’s personal page on consciousness
- A wider range of her video and audio clips, including some on consciousness, can be found here
- Top 10 books about consciousness, chosen by a neuroscientist with clinical interests (The Guardian)
- Top 5 books chosen by Sue
- Swedish TV station (Axess TV). In summer 2015 I grilled some of the world’s experts about the great mysteries of consciousness:
- David Chalmers
- Patricia Churchland
- Andy Clark
- Michael Gazzaniga
- Thomas Metzinger
- Recordings of three of the interviews Sue held for her 2005 book Conversations on Consciousness on the Guardian website. Listen to her talk about what it was like to conduct the interviews and write the book, and then hear conversations with Crick, Dennett and Ramachandran
- The brain basis of cognition: there’s a lot of evidence now (ResearchGate). An ongoing collation of consciousness-related research and discussion with a neuro focus set up by Bernard Baars and colleagues
A reciprocal book review for the American Journal of Psychology, where Sue and Emily review Nick Chater’s The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and The Improvised Mind (2018), and Nick reviews the third edition of Consciousness: An Introduction. You can read the preprint versions of the reviews (plus an extra one of Chater’s book by Dominic Massaro, the journal’s book reviews editor) here:
- Out with folk psychology, in with what? Review of The Mind is Flat by Nick Chater. Allen Lane 2018. Review by Susan Blackmore and Emily Troscianko.
- Consciousness explored. A review of Blackmore, S. & Troscianko, E. T. (2018). Consciousness: An Introduction (Third Edition). Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Review by Nick Chater.
- The richness of flatness. Review of the Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain by Nick Chater. Yale University Press. Review by Dominic W. Massaro.
Videos
We’ve put together a collection of videos about the book, both together and separately. You can find out how we ended up collaborating on the third edition and what has changed since the second; learn what it’s like collaborating with your daughter/mother; and explore suggestions for how we hope you, our reader, will use the book.
How the 3rd edition came about
Sue and Emily discuss about how the third edition came about and how it differs from the second. (With questions from Sue's husband, Adam Hart-Davis.)
Download TranscriptWriting the book with my family
Sue talks about the experience of writing the book with her family.
Download TranscriptCollaborating with Sue
Emily talks about the experience of writing the book with her mother.
Download TranscriptHumanities and mental health Emily
Emily describes how her interest in mental health and her background in literary studies affected how she approached the task of revising the second edition.
Download TranscriptAdditional features sentience line activity
Sue and Emily describe the book’s additional features, and demonstrate the sentience line (Chapter 11) as an example of the class activities.
Download TranscriptWebsite
Sue and Emily outline the material available on the companion website, including the chapter-specific resources, the content removed from the second edition, the self-assessment questions, the enhanced profiles with numerous weblinks, and the hyperlinked bibliography.
Download TranscriptPractices
Sue explains why the personal practices matter so much, using ‘Am I conscious now?’ (Chapter 1) and others as examples, and suggesting some tactics for reminding yourself to actually do them.
Download Transcript