Today, being a Sunday and a break from updating the novel, I drifted back to an earlier question about this whole consciousness thing; is there a way of experiencing my mind’s control over my brain? As I mentioned in my first consciousness article, I had experienced my brain doing a fairly complex task - reading a book out loud - without my conscious involvement. Fascinated by this event, I read further on the subject and studied the famous experiments of Benjamin Libet. His experiments showed that our conscious belief in deciding our actions could be a delusion, we could have no control at all but simply believe we do, a cover-up partly orchestrated by our own brains!

Fortunately, as Libet himself pointed out, that depressing conclusion may not be justified. We may not control our brains’ actions all the time but we may be able to suppress certain actions or initiate actions that our brains wouldn’t automatically carry out by themselves. If that’s true, I wondered, are there some situations which we can use to test that idea?

There is one such possible situation; that of the optical illusion.

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Tags: consciousness

You've probably already noticed this but I've put together a new design for the website. I think I got bored with the old one. I hope you like the new look. Also, a London literary agency has written to me saying that they liked the sample chapters I sent them of 'Faery Engines' and want to read the whole manuscript. It's very welcome news! They may still not want to represent me but it's a big step forward for my first fiction novel. The only problem is, everything in the manuscript apart from the sample chapters is out of date so I have to do a thorough revision of the document. I'm therefore busy, but motivated.

Tags: website