Patrick House

A messy mashup of poetical, psychological, physiological, and philosophical musings by a neuroscientist who sounds like he was tripping balls while writing this book.

According to the title, the purpose is to look at various ways of tackling the complexity of consciousness, but don't expect a comparison of materialism, dualism, panpsychism, or the other competing ideas. Instead, the author makes barely coherent offbeat comparisons to things like pinball machines.

There is no organizing show more principle for the book, each chapter reads like an independent essay, not connected to anything that we've already read, or that we'll read in the upcoming chapters. It's more than a bit jarring, as the central theme of a woman who spontaneously laughed during open brain surgery when the doctor electrically stimulated a particular region of her brain is described anew every time, leaving the reader feeling like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. show less

I did enjoy this book but it is weird to follow due to the amount of metaphors and pop culture references. I did learn some thing but it mainly was random facts that usually didnt correlate with other chapters, there was not a clear sense of direction. It was short and easy to read and it was interesting following Anna's story about her surgery but in the end it didnt really result to anything. 12/16/25

"[Consciousness] is one of the greatest tools available in the hunt for patchy spots of anti-entropy." (p 83) Such semi-poetic thoughts -- perhaps unexpected from a neuroscientist like House -- abound in this collection of essays. The essays (chapters), not the comparatively structured theories of consciousness to which their endnotes frequently allude, are what there are 19 of. Chapter 14, however, puts some focus on Integrated Information Theory (IIT), and Chapter 15 is about show more Penrose-Hameroff theory (Orch OR). show less

I didn't like the writing style or find it particularly illuminating. Apart from stumbling across a few interesting facts, I was rather desperate to finish it to move onto something else!