"The most significant contribution yet to the rapidly growing literature of minds, brains, and consciousness."—Steven Rose

In this masterful rebuttal to the prevailing neuroscientific arguments that seek to explain away consciousness, Merlin Donald presents "a sophisticated conception of a multilayered consciousness drawing much of its power from its cultural matrix" (Booklist). Donald makes "a persuasive case...for consciousness as the central player in the drama of mind" (Peter Dodwell), as he details the forces, both cultural and neuronal, that power our distinctively human modes of awareness. He proposes that the human mind is a hybrid product, interweaving a super-complex form of matter (the brain) with an invisible symbolic web (culture) to form a "distributed" cognitive network. This hybrid mind, he argues, is our main evolutionary advantage, for it allowed humanity as a species to break free of the limitations of the mammalian brain. "Donald transcends the simplistic claims of Evolutionary Psychology,...offering a true Darwinian perspective on the evolution of consciousness."—Philip Lieberman

But things we do in daily life clearly require us to track things much more numerous and much longer than could possibly be accomplished by "seven plus or minus two" chunks, even with clever strategies for grouping things. Donald uses this to argue that conscious processes are very real and not to be ignored, and do play a central role in human intelligence.

Donald unflinchingly takes on the likes of "hardliners" such as Dan Dennett who argue that there is no central "meaner," no self, no little person in our heads observing the stream of consciousness in a Cartesian theater. He points out that the drafts we generate in our minds are not at all arbitrary competitors for dominance, but are distinctly related to goals and expectations. Most insightfully, he argues that discounting the role of conscious processes has dire implications for social and political philosophy and how we view human responsibility for our own actions.

In my view, Donald makes the excellent point for yet poorly understood intermediate term memory mechanisms very convincingly. I was completely persuaded that this is something we need to study to understand human abilities, and that "hardliners" views have some weaknesses I hadn't considered seriously before. He does make one rhetorical twist, though, that confused and sometimes annoyed me until I figured it out. He argues convincingly that we should retain the ideas of executive processes, goals, schema, and expectations, and how they influence thinking. The mind is organized in a central and domain general way for many critical things, rather than being completly modular and the result of bottom-up processing by independent functional agents.

I bought his argument here from fairly early in this excellent book. But then he also consistently equates this kind of organization with what other people call "consciousness," without making it clear at first. So you start wondering why he is calling all sorts of things "conscious" when clearly we

don't notice them !

Most strikingly, in reviewing the research on subliminal effects, he considers them conscious, even though they are seemingly by definition, not ! That is where I discovered that he is relating conscious processes to goal direction and selective attention, not to "noticing." "Noticing" per se actually has very little to do with anyghing in this book. This was a difficult conceptual turn for me, but may be a profound idea. It preserves the idea of consciousness as the selective goal-oriented use of attention to organize the activity of the mind, but doesn't attempt to explain phenomenal awareness per se. His idea of the substrate of consciousness is a neccessary but not sufficient basis for "noticing." The emphasis here is on how we select things to focus our resources on, rather than how phenomenal experience arises. This shift of emphasis allows him to make short work of some of the paradoxical ideas of the hardliners, without trying to tackle the "hard questions" of consciousness directly.

In a way, Merlin Donald takes on the role toward the study of the human mind that Gould, Lewontin, and Rose take toward the study of human evolution. He tries valiantly to bring us back from what he sees as the brink of an awful and unwarranted reductionism. The reductionism of mind to unconscious computation, he points out, threatens the very foundation of our political and economic ideas around freedom and individual responsibility.

Remarkably enough, I think his argument often succeeds.

One of the reasons his argument succeeds is that he makes a very clear distinction between limited consciousness and non-existent consciousness, a line that gets blurred by some philosophers in the process of trying to explain subjective experience in terms of neurons.

Donald describes the difference that makes a difference, that human beings can select their own goals and adjust their own priorities because their nervous system is patterned by a symbolic web of culture to form a distributed cognitive network. Going directly against the modern trend of evolutionary psychology in explaining away awareness as an artifact of functional computational modules, the author argues that human minds do have one very important distinction from other primate minds, a unique additional capacity for consciousness that evolved from the unique conditions of human evolution. The human mind is not, he suggests, simply the result f emergent qualities of an arbitrarily complex neural network. That would be too glib an explanation, and wouldn't explain why sensory nets are aware and not motor nets.

This book seems to be a manifesto of sorts toward a new view of the mind that incorporates what we know about the self and goal-directed domain-independent behavior rather than explaining away these important aspects of human mental function.

28 of 30 found the following review helpful:


Corticocentrism Reconsidered  Nov 07, 2001 By Edward A.Cohen, MD
In this sweeping neocortical neuroparadigm, Merlin Donald brings elan and scholarship in our hour of need.

It has become almost normative to speak of higher consciousness as modular, with each module (attention, emotion, volition and so on...) in turn, a weighted sum of parallel agents interacting in unconscious `pandemonium'. Dennett and other proponents of this view are joined by the evolutionary psychologists, who deconstruct the Purpose of human endeavor by reference to these modules, seen as vestigial survival strategies inappropriate to contemporary life, eg. the frisky male ex-hunter-gatherer dumping MDMA in the drinks of ladies who chance bearing his offspring ..well, you get it.

A picture emerges: an incontrovertibly brilliant series of contributions by `Hardliners' [philosophers, psychologists, linguists and cognitive scientists] has weakened an Emperor already hostage to the `demons' of his unruly New Mind. While holists wave hands and damn the evidence, serious observers nod in depressed capitulation. Another Postmodern Truth has displaced our helmsman to the periphery.

Donald comes to the rescue, wielding formidable expertise and sharp wit. He makes an excellent case for Autonomous Man, without soft fuzzies and without cliche. And he vigorously and cogently propounds a top-down viewpoint.
Cortical Size does count, and human consciousness is active, not a passive construction of the "real stuff" from lower hierarchical levels.

With the unitary perspective that single authorship confers, this kind of coherent articulation stands as a monument to plausible theorizing. Much what Lee Smolin's 'Life of the Cosmos' did for cosmology, 'A Mind So Rare' does for neuropsychology. Maybe Smolin's Universe and Donald's three-pound universe are connected after all.

The book is neither casual in popularization nor dense in neurobabble . Nearly every page discloses smaller and larger insights which make the reader wonder "why, despite a lesser IQ, didn't I think of that? "

Drawbacks? Not when one takes this book on its own terms, but there are some omissions. The big one (two) is Emotion and Value. Donald, effectively flogging the philosophers, needs to conciliate some scientists, eg. Douglas Watt, who just as effectively dethrones the cerebral cortex as Donald enthrones it (see the journal Consciousness & Emotion).

It's thus no surprise that Donald mentions little of the extended limbic system or lower brain centers which undergird crucial emotional and evaluative parameters. But such differences are essentially those of emphasis. One can appreciate the Hardliners and still retain perspective.

Doubts may arise as to testability. Quantum consciousness surely has no slam-dunk model, yet Stuart Hameroff has attended to such concerns. Yet even someone as articulate as Donald can't know everything about everything. It's enough that he effectively (and uniquely) spans the yawning chasm between neural circuitry and cognitive psychology, and does so without making us yawn.

37 of 42 found the following review helpful:


Interesting ideas flawed by sloppy writing  Mar 19, 2002 By John Anderson
I wish that I could jump on the bandwagon of approval that this book seems to be getting, but I am afraid that I can't. I picked A MIND SO RARE for a graduate seminar, largely because of the glowing reviews that it had received here & in some technical journals, but the more I read of it the more irritated I became with Donald's habit of sticking in little jeers & snide asides about his opponents, and his tendency to create straw men for any argument with which he disagrees. Having assigned the book I did my best to keep the conversation going, but to be honest it bombed with the students. Most felt that he could have summarized his "new ideas" in many fewer pages & that the elaborations served to confuse more than to enlighten. It was also hard to follow just whom he was citing or why he chose to leave some theorists out & put others in -this particularly annoying at the graduate level! All in all this is a pity, because some of Donald's ideas suggest interesting alternatives to much of the popularly stated positions in this field, but he would have done us all a much greater service by clearly expounding his points & avoiding the unproductive carping about his (often un-named) opponents.

16 of 17 found the following review helpful:


Consciousness from genetic thru cultural evolution  Aug 07, 2002 By Jim Berk
As a concerned reader I will explain, briefly, what I took from the book, and not critique the negatives. One strength seems to be a multidisciplinary approach. Merlin Donald is a research psychologist and makes an effort to draw from Psychological, Cognative, Neurological, and Evolutionary sciences; as well as literature.

Points: the shift of evolutionary importance from genetic to cultural in the hominid line; recognition of a fourth layer in human mental evolution, that of cultural memory (which he calls "external" memory in his fourth or Theoretic layer); and consideration of the whole of human consciousness.

Donald has expanded on his "Origins of the Human Mind" ('93) with exploring how culture has outstripped genetics in co-evolution with supporting the emergence of Homo Erectus, and then structuring the extended consciousness and symbol manipulation of Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

He postulated a fourth Theoretic layer (after Episotic, Mimetic, and Mythic layers) as an "external symbolic universe", or recorded symbols, or "external memory". But before recorded symbols, the past was only recovered by recall, by both speaker and, often, the listener. Recall must be distinguished from memory (as recorded symbols), for recall of past events or thoughts or moods must be incomplete and personal, whereas using recorded symbols is about interpretation, which is as complete as the writer and reader choose to make it, and is social. If people insist in using 'memory' for 'recall', then recorded symbols should be called 'cultural memory', but it is critically different.

Donald attempts an evolutionary analysis of the integrated, whole of consciousness. Since I am more interested in the human emotional (value) systems than in consciousness, I have one critical comment. Donald ignores the role of emotions in consciousness, which is to leave out feelings (which are the conscious perception of emotions), and the role of emotions in guiding consciousness. Emotions (or values) on several layers interact with most cognative functions.

16 of 18 found the following review helpful:


Interesting book, confused sometimes.  Jul 29, 2002 By Carlos Camara "marrorris2"
This is a book about consciousness, but Donald concentrates on extended human consciousness. His approach is functional and psychological, not neurobiological, but he uses neurobiological evidence here and there. The first thing Donald does is discuss many different views on consicousness, dismissing their proponents as "hardliners" and their theories as unsatisfactory. For example, he does not like the equating of consicousness to perception or sensation (nick humphrey, robert kirk, etc..). He also does not like working memory and language-as-consciousess theories (Fodor, Jaynes, John G. Taylor, Larry Weiskrantz, Dennett, but I think he has a point- aphasics, deaf mutes, and non linguistic creatures {probably} are conscious). Consciousnes is none of this, Donald argues. It is a cognitive ability of executive control, multifocal capacity with a vast evolutionary heritage. Now I would agree with this, but Donalds objections probably arise from confusions. For example, he fails to notice that theorists that equate consciousness with sensation have phenomenal consicousness (qualia) in mind (think of Blocks distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness) not full fledged extended human consciousness. It is true access consciousness cannot be reduced to sensation, but phenomenal consciousness might (notice the might). The same with at least some language theorists (Dennett, for example) They claim not that consicousness is language, but that it is essential for it, especially in the human type of consicousness. This is something Donald argues for later in the book himself. The same with working memory as consciousness theories. They explain the role of WM in consciousness, wich Donald also considers essential.

Apart form these confusions in the reading by Donald of the literature, there is also his idea that short-term memory and capacity limitations are not helpful concepts. Consciousness, Donald says, is more of an intermediate term phenomenon. (Does Donald then equate consciousness with memory, and if so, is this contradictory? THink of hippocampal lesioned patients, who though consicous, can only function in intervals of seconds, before forgetting that period). His confusion I think, rests in his conception of short term memory. He argues that human consicousnes takes place in temporal units of many minutes and hours, like in the following of a converation, and since WM is of the order of seconds, this cannot be the whole story. But it is not clear to me that one could not explain Donalds "intermediate term" consciousness by alluding to WM plus some sort of reactivation by top-down processes.

To me the strongest part of the book is where Donald argues that not only humans are conscious. Consicousness emerged in stages, with different characteristics and abilities, and there is no good reason to deny it to many mamals. Humans and primates, are in a diferent class altogether. They have a group of executive abilities that make consciousness more interesting. He proposes three levels, binding, working memory, intermediate and long term control. Binding is perceptual consciousness, the coherent representation of objects, and is probably the basic form of awareness, present in many species. Working memory is extends binding in time, and is probably characteristic of primates and select mamals. Intermediate control is episodic, executive, and extends consciousness considerably, in place probably in social mamals. Here one could see that Donald fals prey of his own primary objections. He objects to consicousness being identified with working memory, language, or sensation alone, but he seems to say consicousness is all of these things together. This is not extremely self-consistent.

Next comes Donalds major point. That human consicousness is not just that. THere is more, and that is the fact that we are not just brains, but brains in culture, and that culture and language expand consciousness into the human kind we enjoy. That is, we compute symbolically, but also analogically, we are "hybrid minds". Donald lists pre-requisites of this deep enculturation. There is extended executive function, superplasticity in cortex, the evolution of asssociation areas in cortex, voluntary access to memory, and an extended working memory. This, along with the influence of culture and language, is human consicousness.

Enculturation, is to Donald essential, as can be seen in the last chapters of the book that recapitulate the ideas of his former book "Origins of the Modern Mind", about the three stages of cognitive evolution of mimesis, episodic ability and invention of symbolic comunication and external storage. This is a different matter from consicousness altogether, that proposes how the human cognitive architecture evolved. It is a very intreresting theory, that Donald at the end uses to structure his ideas on consciousness.

Donalds book is very thought provoking, but has some very questionable claims (For example, he says there are no projections from association cortex to sensory cortex, which is wrong, or that neural networks might be consicous but not serial computers, even though neural nets are implemented on the latter, being comitted to the strange position that in a computer the software might be consicous, but not the computer itself) probably due to his strange reading of the literature. He critiques models of consciousness as essentially misleading, but not noticing that it is because other theorists concentrate on primary, sensory and access consicousness, not the whole of human consciousness with its exeptional range of characteristics. He also forgets about emotions and their role on creating the self and consciousness, as well as the role of sub cortical structures, like MRT, thalamus, etc.) By concentrating on HUMAN consciousness, he only partially explains this elusive phenomenon, not giving even hints about the nature of phenomenal consciousness, and only very abstractly proposing testable hypotheses, a fatal flaw in my view for any science-inclined book.

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