Like Donald, Dennet, and others, I too have no idea how sentences come forth from what must be a tangle where memories, cultural conventions, and sensations converge. They may be duking it out for attention in there, but Donald is convincing in finding executive consciousness in charge of what emerges, at least in members of the "consciousness club" that include a few advanced primates as well as hominids. Mental hybrids whose consciousness combines nature with learning move fairly effortlessly from short-term awareness to intermediate and longer spans. While reading chapter eight we remember the gist of chapters one through seven and if called upon something vaguely perhaps of Darwin, Dawkins, and Gould as well. Contributions from neighboring fields of literary criticism, philosophy, evolutionary biology, and historical linguistics also find their way into Donald's keyboard work and our tracking of the results. These acrobatic accomplishments the executive consciousness can choose to do or not.

Illustrations and tables like the one on levels of conscious capacity (195), applicable to short term, moderate length, and long-term memory, help us bind stages of the argument together. That conceptual architecture accompanies a chronological logic that since Darwin underlies work in cognitive evolution, historical linguistics, biology, paleontology, and archaeology. Knowing how the human brain got to be what it is helps us sort out its internal hierarchy from episodic impressions to the use of symbols. (For that linear story it helps to have read Donald's earlier Origins of the Modern Mind , 1991.)

Donald's prose is fully up to this multilevel task. It is never less than accessible and as a bonus is spiced with quicksilver deliveries. He doesn't make the argument that style is the mark of individual consciousness, but no one writes precisely this way, any more than anyone writes exactly like Donald Culross Peattie or Stephen Jay Gould. Each executive self comes across in its own way both in print and in person. That is partly what the fuss is about-self-making amid a large common store of information and ideas on deposit in libraries, digital storage, and other minds.

My one complaint of any significance is Donald's unstinting praise of the achievements of the mind so rare and lack of comparable attention to its deceptions and aggression. Cheating, theft, and deception in some primates and widespread antisocial behavior in Homo sapiens sapiens warrant more attention than they generally get. As for the latter, we don't lack for historical records, and thanks to the recording of nearly everything these days, we have abundant exposure to new devious brains almost daily. Minds that defy rationality and follow myths originating millennia ago are also in no short supply. Once such collectives have distinguished other races, dialects, creeds, religions, and nations they often decide that attacking them is the thing to do.

Since that practice cuts across races and cultures-as what sometimes passes as universal grammar also does-aggression, the tendency to err, and lying should perhaps be added to the list of things we suspect might be genetically hardwired in the most massively destructive of species.

Nonetheless, a fine study of the mind. It easily keeps up with the best of the kind that I've encountered.

This is a strange book, and I couldn't figure out why until about page 225. Donald starts out even on page one lumping a collection of psychologists into a group, and then stereotyping and belittling them. This went on until about page 50. The problem: many of them actually disagreed with each other about the nature of the mind. It was clear that his attacks were unfair. But why?


Then he grandly claims to have a new, improved theory of consciousness. Here is where the book becomes strangely split. One the one hand, he proposes some structures of the mind that may be novel, but which look somewhat like the work of some of the researchers that he had just belittled. He describes structures of the brain and proposes a function he calls episodic awareness. This is the part of the book that I like. But then he insists on welding this new structure to a hypothesis that I find highly speculative (read wrong). He claims that the human brain is a hybird, partly built by biology and partly built by culture. Nothing in his brain / mind science requires that this odd connection be made. Because of this claim, he takes a number of odd positions, such as that novelists are better psychologists that psychologists are, and that language is a cultural skill rather than an instinct. He makes the whopper of a claim that the associative learning of neural nets is responsible for consciousness.


Finally, past page 200, he comes out of the closet. He is actually a connectivist, one of the tradition that was cut to pieces by Steven Pinker in "How the Mind Works." So the better part of his book is his contribution to mind science, which is not incompatible with evolutionary/modular psychology. However, the book's opening attacks and odd hypothesis of humans as cultural cyborgs comes from his desire to reject the modular theory of the mind for the higher faculties of the human thought. In this book, he tries to allow some of the modular brain organization--and here he may actually be making a contribution to mind science--without relinquishing most of the human mind's unique abilities from the connectivist programme. For more details, see my review on WorldCat.

first: I haven't finished reading the book and am not sure I will
second: Donald readily acknowledges that there are multiple meanings to the word consciousness, he than takes one meaning "the creative engine itself, [...] the center of human genius". He even acknowledges that "this book proposes a theory of consciousness that [...] does not try to 'explain' how awareness could have emerged from a material thing such as a brain". But then he starts to slash against anyone (like e.g. Dennett) who tries to develop such explanations. He is so consumed in fighting against the 'hardliners' that his own theory is invisible and often rests on his (ours) intuition that there must be "somebody home". He even compares the telling of such theories with telling someone that his parents are "Jack the Ripper and Elsa, She-Wolf of the SS" (p. 45). Strong picture but weak argument.

I think his further arguments about complex interactions like an evening long conversation about a film has its merits, showing that there is something more about culture and consciousness, memory and inter-subject communication, than what someone like Dennett (or Pinker) is trying to explain. But that is the point: they are trying to explain a different meaning of the word consciousness: "How does it work on a basic level, how could consciousness 'become' and not how it evolved from there. So Donald in his attacks is comparing apples to oranges and that makes his book a pain to read.

Donald's A MIND SO RARE was an enjoyable read. It is probably the only book that I enjoyed reading, while disagreeing with almost all the conclusions that the author has reached.
I think the attack on hardliners is a game of words. Donald disagrees with how Dennett, for instance, defines consciousness. I think the hardliners might refer to the phenomenological aspects of consciousness as epiphenomenal, however, they view the functional aspects (online represtation of the world) as a crucial to survival.
I found the distinction of different levels of awareness that Donald overviews very helpful. I might disagree however, that all aspects of the intermediate term/long term awareness are conscious. I think that they are reducible to short term memories bound in time by unconscious processes.
The case that Donald makes for enculturation as key for making of the human consciousness is fascinating. I think the book would have been much better if he got straight into that point. It is confusing to try to connect his arguments in the begging of the book to those at the end. However, I give this book 4 stars for being such a great source of information.

This is a book about consciousness, but Donald concentrates on extended human consciousness. His approach is functional and psychological, not neurobiological, but he uses neurobiological evidence here and there. The first thing Donald does is discuss many different views on consicousness, dismissing their proponents as "hardliners" and their theories as unsatisfactory. For example, he does not like the equating of consicousness to perception or sensation (nick humphrey, robert kirk, etc..). He also does not like working memory and language-as-consciousess theories (Fodor, Jaynes, John G. Taylor, Larry Weiskrantz, Dennett, but I think he has a point- aphasics, deaf mutes, and non linguistic creatures {probably} are conscious). Consciousnes is none of this, Donald argues. It is a cognitive ability of executive control, multifocal capacity with a vast evolutionary heritage. Now I would agree with this, but Donalds objections probably arise from confusions. For example, he fails to notice that theorists that equate consciousness with sensation have phenomenal consicousness (qualia) in mind (think of Blocks distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness) not full fledged extended human consciousness. It is true access consciousness cannot be reduced to sensation, but phenomenal consciousness might (notice the might). The same with at least some language theorists (Dennett, for example) They claim not that consicousness is language, but that it is essential for it, especially in the human type of consicousness. This is something Donald argues for later in the book himself. The same with working memory as consciousness theories. They explain the role of WM in consciousness, wich Donald also considers essential.

Apart form these confusions in the reading by Donald of the literature, there is also his idea that short-term memory and capacity limitations are not helpful concepts. Consciousness, Donald says, is more of an intermediate term phenomenon. (Does Donald then equate consciousness with memory, and if so, is this contradictory? THink of hippocampal lesioned patients, who though consicous, can only function in intervals of seconds, before forgetting that period). His confusion I think, rests in his conception of short term memory. He argues that human consicousnes takes place in temporal units of many minutes and hours, like in the following of a converation, and since WM is of the order of seconds, this cannot be the whole story. But it is not clear to me that one could not explain Donalds "intermediate term" consciousness by alluding to WM plus some sort of reactivation by top-down processes.

To me the strongest part of the book is where Donald argues that not only humans are conscious. Consicousness emerged in stages, with different characteristics and abilities, and there is no good reason to deny it to many mamals. Humans and primates, are in a diferent class altogether. They have a group of executive abilities that make consciousness more interesting. He proposes three levels, binding, working memory, intermediate and long term control. Binding is perceptual consciousness, the coherent representation of objects, and is probably the basic form of awareness, present in many species. Working memory is extends binding in time, and is probably characteristic of primates and select mamals. Intermediate control is episodic, executive, and extends consciousness considerably, in place probably in social mamals. Here one could see that Donald fals prey of his own primary objections. He objects to consicousness being identified with working memory, language, or sensation alone, but he seems to say consicousness is all of these things together. This is not extremely self-consistent.

Next comes Donalds major point. That human consicousness is not just that. THere is more, and that is the fact that we are not just brains, but brains in culture, and that culture and language expand consciousness into the human kind we enjoy. That is, we compute symbolically, but also analogically, we are "hybrid minds". Donald lists pre-requisites of this deep enculturation. There is extended executive function, superplasticity in cortex, the evolution of asssociation areas in cortex, voluntary access to memory, and an extended working memory. This, along with the influence of culture and language, is human consicousness.

Enculturation, is to Donald essential, as can be seen in the last chapters of the book that recapitulate the ideas of his former book "Origins of the Modern Mind", about the three stages of cognitive evolution of mimesis, episodic ability and invention of symbolic comunication and external storage. This is a different matter from consicousness altogether, that proposes how the human cognitive architecture evolved. It is a very intreresting theory, that Donald at the end uses to structure his ideas on consciousness.

Donalds book is very thought provoking, but has some very questionable claims (For example, he says there are no projections from association cortex to sensory cortex, which is wrong, or that neural networks might be consicous but not serial computers, even though neural nets are implemented on the latter, being comitted to the strange position that in a computer the software might be consicous, but not the computer itself) probably due to his strange reading of the literature. He critiques models of consciousness as essentially misleading, but not noticing that it is because other theorists concentrate on primary, sensory and access consicousness, not the whole of human consciousness with its exeptional range of characteristics. He also forgets about emotions and their role on creating the self and consciousness, as well as the role of sub cortical structures, like MRT, thalamus, etc.) By concentrating on HUMAN consciousness, he only partially explains this elusive phenomenon, not giving even hints about the nature of phenomenal consciousness, and only very abstractly proposing testable hypotheses, a fatal flaw in my view for any science-inclined book.

I wish that I could jump on the bandwagon of approval that this book seems to be getting, but I am afraid that I can't. I picked A MIND SO RARE for a graduate seminar, largely because of the glowing reviews that it had received here & in some technical journals, but the more I read of it the more irritated I became with Donald's habit of sticking in little jeers & snide asides about his opponents, and his tendency to create straw men for any argument with which he disagrees. Having assigned the book I did my best to keep the conversation going, but to be honest it bombed with the students. Most felt that he could have summarized his "new ideas" in many fewer pages & that the elaborations served to confuse more than to enlighten. It was also hard to follow just whom he was citing or why he chose to leave some theorists out & put others in -this particularly annoying at the graduate level! All in all this is a pity, because some of Donald's ideas suggest interesting alternatives to much of the popularly stated positions in this field, but he would have done us all a much greater service by clearly expounding his points & avoiding the unproductive carping about his (often un-named) opponents.

What is human conscience? How did it develop? What is language? In what part of evolution did language first exist? These are questions that Merlin Donald deals with in his book A mind so Rare.
The first chapters are devoted to a criticism of the Hardliners, people like Steven Pinker, Jackendoff, Noam Chomsky and others who think that language can be explained as a solely innate process. Merlin Donald gives lots of examples - among them Helen Keller - of how this might not be true. Language must be consciously aquired, and this can be done in many ways. Thus he argues that conscience is a prerequisite of language.
His book is the first one I have read where the vast, seemingly fathomless possibilities of the human mind are explored. Contrary to Steven Pinker, who wants to narrow down language to a common brain-base for all of mankind, Donald shows that our possibilities of symbolic expression are virtually without limits.
His conclusion is that language has been aquired from the outside and in, that it's not an innate process but a cultural one. It developed from acting, body-language, sounds and other primitive means of communication within hunting and food-gathering groups, he claims.
But is this an explanation? Body language is also a form of language, pointing has to be learned consciously as Wittgenstein has shown (to point might mean: look in the other direction, or anything at all). It seems that Donald is saying that language is a prerequisite of language. He has to explain how language taken in a wider context including body language could arise in the first place. He has to show how you can be conscious (if consciousness precedes language) without knowing that you are conscious, that is without having some sort of language.
My guess is that both Hardliners and those speaking in behalf of deep enculturation like Donald are wrong and that language (some sort of symbols) and conscience arose simultaneously. When you study language you are already enveloped in language and can never go back to the beginning, something that strongly advocates my view. You are in chains when you try to find out what chains are, which makes it impossible to do so.
Donald's book is nevertheless very interesting. His attempts to smother Hardliners are very convincing and therefore worth every bit of praise that they can get.

In this sweeping neocortical neuroparadigm, Merlin Donald brings elan and scholarship in our hour of need.

It has become almost normative to speak of higher consciousness as modular, with each module (attention, emotion, volition and so on...) in turn, a weighted sum of parallel agents interacting in unconscious `pandemonium'. Dennett and other proponents of this view are joined by the evolutionary psychologists, who deconstruct the Purpose of human endeavor by reference to these modules, seen as vestigial survival strategies inappropriate to contemporary life, eg. the frisky male ex-hunter-gatherer dumping MDMA in the drinks of ladies who chance bearing his offspring ..well, you get it.

A picture emerges: an incontrovertibly brilliant series of contributions by `Hardliners' [philosophers, psychologists, linguists and cognitive scientists] has weakened an Emperor already hostage to the `demons' of his unruly New Mind. While holists wave hands and damn the evidence, serious observers nod in depressed capitulation. Another Postmodern Truth has displaced our helmsman to the periphery.

Donald comes to the rescue, wielding formidable expertise and sharp wit. He makes an excellent case for Autonomous Man, without soft fuzzies and without cliche. And he vigorously and cogently propounds a top-down viewpoint.
Cortical Size does count, and human consciousness is active, not a passive construction of the "real stuff" from lower hierarchical levels.

With the unitary perspective that single authorship confers, this kind of coherent articulation stands as a monument to plausible theorizing. Much what Lee Smolin's 'Life of the Cosmos' did for cosmology, 'A Mind So Rare' does for neuropsychology. Maybe Smolin's Universe and Donald's three-pound universe are connected after all.

The book is neither casual in popularization nor dense in neurobabble . Nearly every page discloses smaller and larger insights which make the reader wonder "why, despite a lesser IQ, didn't I think of that? "

Drawbacks? Not when one takes this book on its own terms, but there are some omissions. The big one (two) is Emotion and Value. Donald, effectively flogging the philosophers, needs to conciliate some scientists, eg. Douglas Watt, who just as effectively dethrones the cerebral cortex as Donald enthrones it (see the journal Consciousness & Emotion).

It's thus no surprise that Donald mentions little of the extended limbic system or lower brain centers which undergird crucial emotional and evaluative parameters. But such differences are essentially those of emphasis. One can appreciate the Hardliners and still retain perspective.

Doubts may arise as to testability. Quantum consciousness surely has no slam-dunk model, yet Stuart Hameroff has attended to such concerns. Yet even someone as articulate as Donald can't know everything about everything. It's enough that he effectively (and uniquely) spans the yawning chasm between neural circuitry and cognitive psychology, and does so without making us yawn.

A delightful polemic with a valuable point. Donald dramatically uses the intricate demands of a face to face conversation to show the practical weaknesses in the laboratory view of short and long term memory. The laboratory evidence that working memory is very limited is overwhelming, and has fed the modern philosophical trend toward viewing conscious awareness as an illusory result of the work of unconscious agents.

But things we do in daily life clearly require us to track things much more numerous and much longer than could possibly be accomplished by "seven plus or minus two" chunks, even with clever strategies for grouping things. Donald uses this to argue that conscious processes are very real and not to be ignored, and do play a central role in human intelligence.

Donald unflinchingly takes on the likes of "hardliners" such as Dan Dennett who argue that there is no central "meaner," no self, no little person in our heads observing the stream of consciousness in a Cartesian theater. He points out that the drafts we generate in our minds are not at all arbitrary competitors for dominance, but are distinctly related to goals and expectations. Most insightfully, he argues that discounting the role of conscious processes has dire implications for social and political philosophy and how we view human responsibility for our own actions.

In my view, Donald makes the excellent point for yet poorly understood intermediate term memory mechanisms very convincingly. I was completely persuaded that this is something we need to study to understand human abilities, and that "hardliners" views have some weaknesses I hadn't considered seriously before. He does make one rhetorical twist, though, that confused and sometimes annoyed me until I figured it out. He argues convincingly that we should retain the ideas of executive processes, goals, schema, and expectations, and how they influence thinking. The mind is organized in a central and domain general way for many critical things, rather than being completly modular and the result of bottom-up processing by independent functional agents.

I bought his argument here from fairly early in this excellent book. But then he also consistently equates this kind of organization with what other people call "consciousness," without making it clear at first. So you start wondering why he is calling all sorts of things "conscious" when clearly we

don't notice them !

Most strikingly, in reviewing the research on subliminal effects, he considers them conscious, even though they are seemingly by definition, not ! That is where I discovered that he is relating conscious processes to goal direction and selective attention, not to "noticing." "Noticing" per se actually has very little to do with anyghing in this book. This was a difficult conceptual turn for me, but may be a profound idea. It preserves the idea of consciousness as the selective goal-oriented use of attention to organize the activity of the mind, but doesn't attempt to explain phenomenal awareness per se. His idea of the substrate of consciousness is a neccessary but not sufficient basis for "noticing." The emphasis here is on how we select things to focus our resources on, rather than how phenomenal experience arises. This shift of emphasis allows him to make short work of some of the paradoxical ideas of the hardliners, without trying to tackle the "hard questions" of consciousness directly.

In a way, Merlin Donald takes on the role toward the study of the human mind that Gould, Lewontin, and Rose take toward the study of human evolution. He tries valiantly to bring us back from what he sees as the brink of an awful and unwarranted reductionism. The reductionism of mind to unconscious computation, he points out, threatens the very foundation of our political and economic ideas around freedom and individual responsibility.

Remarkably enough, I think his argument often succeeds.

One of the reasons his argument succeeds is that he makes a very clear distinction between limited consciousness and non-existent consciousness, a line that gets blurred by some philosophers in the process of trying to explain subjective experience in terms of neurons.

Donald describes the difference that makes a difference, that human beings can select their own goals and adjust their own priorities because their nervous system is patterned by a symbolic web of culture to form a distributed cognitive network. Going directly against the modern trend of evolutionary psychology in explaining away awareness as an artifact of functional computational modules, the author argues that human minds do have one very important distinction from other primate minds, a unique additional capacity for consciousness that evolved from the unique conditions of human evolution. The human mind is not, he suggests, simply the result f emergent qualities of an arbitrarily complex neural network. That would be too glib an explanation, and wouldn't explain why sensory nets are aware and not motor nets.

This book seems to be a manifesto of sorts toward a new view of the mind that incorporates what we know about the self and goal-directed domain-independent behavior rather than explaining away these important aspects of human mental function.