Brain, Vol. 125, No. 11, 2581-2582,
November 2002
© 2002 Oxford University Press
Book Review |
NEUROCHEMISTRY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: NEUROTRANSMITTERS IN MIND
Walton Centre for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Liverpool, UK
NEUROCHEMISTRY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: NEUROTRANSMITTERS IN MIND
Edited by E. Perry, H. Ashton and A. Young
2002. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Price €65. ISBN 1588111245.
| The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below. |
Of what relevance is the study of the neural correlates of consciousness to the practice of clinical neurology? Until recently, one answer to this question might reasonably have been ‘not much’, consciousness being largely taken for granted by neurologists except in those cases in which it was deemed ‘impaired’ or ‘reduced’, in which case steps to identify the cause(s) of impairment needed to be undertaken. Hence, the study of consciousness has largely been the preserve of philosophers, a domain of questions rather than answers (Dennett, 1996
). However, neuroscientists have become increasingly interested in consciousness with the realization that its neural correlates, particularly electrophysiological and functional anatomical, might possibly be defined with existing research techniques (Zeman, 2001). The editors of this book, building on their known neuropharmacological interests (Perry et