Tallis in Wonderland

A Smile At Waterloo Station

Raymond Tallis on the true mystery of memory.

Regular readers of this column will know that despite my background in neuroscience, I am not persuaded that brain activity is a sufficient explanation of any aspect of human consciousness. Notwithstanding the claims of ‘neurophilosophy’, I do not think my feelings, emotions and thoughts are reducible to nerve impulses. What may be less obvious is that I am very grateful to the errors of the neurophilosophers for inadvertently and indirectly making visible the true mystery of consciousness. I felt this gratitude particularly strongly the other day when I was reading about Eric Kandel’s research on one particularly intriguing aspect of consciousness: memory. This was the exquisite work for which he received the 2000 Nobel Prize for Medicine.

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