ABSTRACT
Consciousness, that is, in the human sense, awareness not only of a range of stimuli, sensations and perceptions such as animals show, but a subjective sense of personal identity, of the self, at the centre of individual existence. Greenfield, who starts out from the perspective of primarily neurophysiology and biochemistry, describes consciousness as ‘the inside-the-skin sensation’, which is a start, but leaves out the recipient of the sensation. The scientific literature on consciousness is large, influential and growing, and largely rooted in neurobiology. In an essay on a much wider circle of writers, David Lodge describes what are in effect the narrative threads on the loom of consciousness, the neuropsychological weft going the other way to complete the weaving process. Everything about the normally functioning mind seems rather quiet and still within, and this surely affects our concept of brain and thought.
