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General Resources

Here you will find some useful, interesting, and inspiring resources to support your understanding as you read through the textbook.

1

General Resources

  • Download the Practice Journal, designed to give you a place to jot down your thinking about consciousness as you read the book. Each chapter has blue highlighted sections to prompt you to turn to the journal and write something before moving on.
  • Sue’s personal page on consciousness
  • A wider range of her video and audio clips, including some on consciousness, can be found here
  • Top 10 books about consciousness, chosen by a neuroscientist with clinical interests (The Guardian)
  • Top 5 books chosen by Sue
  • Swedish TV station (Axess TV). In summer 2015 Sue grilled some of the world’s experts about the great mysteries of consciousness:
  • Recordings of three of the interviews Sue held for her 2005 book Conversations on Consciousness on the Guardian website. Listen to her talk about what it was like to conduct the interviews and write the book, and then hear conversations with Crick, Dennett and Ramachandran

A reciprocal book review for the American Journal of Psychology, where Sue and Emily review Nick Chater’s The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and The Improvised Mind (2018), and Nick reviews the third edition of Consciousness: An Introduction. You can read the preprint versions of the reviews (plus an extra one of Chater’s book by Dominic Massaro, the journal’s book reviews editor) here:

  • Out with folk psychology, in with what? Review of The Mind is Flat by Nick Chater. Allen Lane 2018. Review by Susan Blackmore and Emily Troscianko.
  • Consciousness explored. A review of Blackmore, S. & Troscianko, E. T. (2018). Consciousness: An Introduction (Third Edition). Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Review by Nick Chater.
  • The richness of flatness. Review of the Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain by Nick Chater. Yale University Press. Review by Dominic W. Massaro.
2

Videos

Sue and Emily have put together a collection of videos about the book, both together and separately. You can find out how they ended up collaborating on the third and fourth editions; learn what it’s like collaborating with your daughter/mother; and explore suggestions for how to make best use of the book. In some cases the discussion explicitly references the third edition but the content applies similarly to the fourth.

Videos created for the 4th edition

How the 4th edition came about

Sue and Emily talk about how the fourth edition came about and the discuss the experience of updating the textbook during a DIY writing retreat in Madeira.

Deciding to write the 4th edition

Sue and Emily talk about how they made the decision to go ahead with revising the book for the fourth edition

Refining and reflecting

Sue and Emily explore the difficulties of deciding what to keep and what to lose for the new edition, and why the old questions are still worth asking

Developments in consciousness studies

Sue and Emily touch on predictive processing, adversarial collaboration, and other changes in consciousness studies since the third edition

Book signing at The Science of Consciousness, Tucson 2024

Sue and Emily talk to Nick Day about the conference and the book. Video copyright © Conscious Pictures 2024.

Watch the full video at https://youtu.be/Jf0U5jYf9Qs

Susan Blackmore and Deepak Chopra in Conversation

Sue talks to Deepak Chopra about how understanding consciousness can transform your perspective on life and death.

How and why to teach consciousness At Tucson 2022

Sue and Emily explore the challenges of teaching consciousness and why it makes a great context for questioning the apparently obvious. (Their talk is the first 30 minutes of the panel.)

Videos created for the 3rd edition

Short book description

Emily gives a short description of the book.

Writing the book with my family

Sue talks about the experience of writing the book with her family.

Collaborating with Sue

Emily talks about the experience of writing the book with her mother.

Humanities and mental health

Emily describes how her interest in mental health and her background in literary studies affected how she approached the task of revising the second edition.

Additional features and sentience line activity

Sue and Emily describe the book’s additional features, and demonstrate the sentience line (Chapter 11) as an example of the class activities.

Website

Sue and Emily outline the material available on the companion website, including the chapter-specific resources, the content removed from the second edition, the self-assessment questions, the enhanced profiles with numerous weblinks, and the hyperlinked bibliography.

Practices

Sue explains why the personal practices matter so much, using ‘Am I conscious now?’ (Chapter 1) and others as examples, and suggesting some tactics for reminding yourself to actually do them.

How the 3rd edition came about

Sue and Emily discuss about how the third edition came about and how it differed from the second. (With questions from Sue's husband, Adam Hart-Davis.)