100287: Consciousness – A Very Short Introduction

About the Course:

“Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction challenges readers to reconsider key concepts such as personality, free will, and the soul. How can a physical brain create our experience of the world? What creates our identity? Do we really have free will? Could consciousness itself be an illusion? Exciting new developments in brain science are opening up these debates, and the field has now expanded to include biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers. This book clarifies the potentially confusing arguments and clearly describes the major theories, with illustrations and lively cartoons to help explain the experiments. Topics include vision and attention, theories of self, experiments on action and awareness, altered states of consciousness, and the effects of brain damage and drugs. This… book provides a clear overview of the subject that combines the perspectives of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience—and serves as a much-needed launch pad for further exploration of this complicated and unsolved issue.”

Author

Susan Blackmore, Ph.D.

About the Authors:

“Susan Blackmore is a psychologist, freelance writer, and lecturer. The author of numerous scientific articles and book contributions, she writes for several magazines and newspapersÂ? Her books includeÂ? The Meme Machine (1999), Consciousness: An Introduction (2003), and Conversations about Consciousness (forthcoming in 2005).”

Recommended For:

This course is recommended for health care professionals, especially psychologists, counselors, social workers, and nurses who seek knowledge about the nature of consciousness. It is appropriate for intermediate to advanced levels of participants’ knowledge.

Course Objectives:

1. Better define concepts such as time and space, the self, conscious will, and altered states of consciousness.

2. Examine recent experiments on aspects of consciousness and determine what appears most valid and relevant to them.

3. Evaluate the role of consciousness in psychotherapy.

4. Examine future directions in consciousness research and identify sources of additional information.