ABSTRACT
The topic of consciousness offers a fascinating reminder of the power of fashion in scienti®c thought. Early in the twentieth century, the behaviourist psychologist J.B. Watson attempted to de®ne it out of existence: socalled consciousness was merely behaviour, measurable and controllable like any other physical event. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (2000) tells us that, as recently as the 1970s, ambitious neuroscientists who were curious about consciousness were well advised to keep their thoughts to themselves: they would quickly have been dismissed as ¯aky. And yet, since the 1980s, consciousness has become one of the hottest topics around, eagerly studied by neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and evolutionary biologists, and the object of innumerable books, academic papers and competing theories.
