July 14, 2006

I Am, Therefore I Think

By DAVID P. BARASH

Consciousness has long been the third rail of biology: Touch it — and maybe you don't die, but you are unlikely to get tenure. It helps, of course, if you are a Nobel laureate, such as Francis Crick or Gerald M. Edelman, but until recently, it appeared that even their attempts to pin down the electrical-chemical-anatomical (or whatever) substrate of consciousness would go the way of Einstein's doomed search for a unified theory of everything.

That may yet be the case, but

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