The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning

On the night of Thursday, May 8, 1997, my father had a stroke. I’d been repeatedly reassured that the stroke was “very minor.” Nevertheless, when I visited him in the hospital, I felt profoundly disturbed by what I witnessed. This sluggish, exhausted man in front of me looked like my father, but I knew, deep down, that he wasn’t.

There were subtle clues that betrayed this impostor. Some changes verged on the comical, such as his newfound obsession for Kit Kats—he would eat nothing else for days. Others were more disconcerting. These differences could generally be characterized as a reversion from a sharp, responsible man into a confused child. Even more bizarrely, his attitude toward me would radically alter depending on whether I sat on the right or left side of his bed. When I sat on his right, he would take an interest in me, and we’d have a semi-coherent conversation. When I went instead to his left, it was as though I wasn’t in the room. He simply wasn’t aware of my presence.

I found myself morbidly wishing that he’d suffered a mild heart attack instead of a stroke. Then, at least, my dad would still be alive, as my dad. As it was, if this situation persisted, a portion of my father would already have died, and every time he spoke, I would be reminded of that fragment of his identity that was lost.

Amid my sense of shock at this new person that wasn’t Dad, and my chest-gripping anxiety that he would never fully recover, I couldn’t help examining his symptoms dispassionately. My father’s stroke had struck a few weeks before my university finals. I was studying philosophy and biological psychology, and consciousness was a hot topic in both fields. On the one hand, I was revising elegant philosophical arguments proposing that consciousness was nonphysical and had little to do with brains. On the other hand, I was poring over the evidence for whether consciousness lay in this cortical region or that, and learning the details of “neglect”—the common stroke condition my father showed by ignoring the left side of space.

Sitting by my father’s bedside, I felt sure that the esoteric philosophical position was alien—so mistaken as almost to be offensive. Here was a man I loved dearly, robbed of his identity because a small clot on his brain had potently wounded his consciousness.
Of course consciousness is a physical thing
, I thought, as I sat on his left, achieving the painful magic trick of turning invisible. I didn’t exactly know why the philosophical arguments were flawed, or which brain theory of consciousness was most compelling at the time, but I did know which road I wanted to take to find out.

Although previously I was considering a PhD in the philosophy of mind, now there was no contest—a PhD in the neuroscience of consciousness it was. Soon afterward, I was accepted to study this at the University of Cambridge. I’ve been investigating this and related fields ever since, mainly at Cambridge, but also recently at the newly opened Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex. From the first painful glimpse of my father’s fractured consciousness, I understood how vital and fundamental this field is, but over the years I’ve increasingly discovered its fascinating and far-reaching twists and turns. Now I want to share each of these facets with you.

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