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The Ego Tunnel
- The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self
- Narrated by: Kevin Pariseau
- Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins
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Publisher's summary
But if the self is not "real," why and how did it evolve? How does the brain construct it? Do we still have souls, free will, personal autonomy, or moral accountability?
In a time when the science of cognition is becoming as controversial as evolution, The Ego Tunnel provides a stunningly original take on the mystery of the mind.
Critic reviews
"Groundbreaking. This sophisticated understanding of the brain as an ego machine accounts remarkably well for the lived experience of being someone, a someone who transforms a bombardment of stimuli into a seamless present while still engaging in off-line planning for the future and reflection on the past." ( Booklist)
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Based on the authors' wildly popular Huffington Post article "18 Things That Creative People Do Differently" (which generated five million views and 500,000 Facebook shares in one week), this well-researched and engaging audiobook uncovers what we know about creativity, and what anyone can do to enhance this essential aspect of their lives and work.
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Solitude, Showers and Awe, Oh My!
- By Gillian on 01-05-16
By: Carolyn Gregoire, and others
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Hidden Dimensions
- The Unification of Physics and Consciousness
- By: B. Alan Wallace
- Narrated by: Stow Lovejoy
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Bridging the gap between the world of science and the realm of the spiritual, Wallace, a pioneer of modern consciousness research, offers a practical and revolutionary method for exploring the mind that combines the keenest insights of contemporary physics and philosophers with the time-honored meditative traditions of Buddhism.
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Great companion piece to Anathem by Stephenson
- By Kal on 02-20-09
By: B. Alan Wallace
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The Perfect You
- A Blueprint for Identity
- By: Dr. Caroline Leaf, Avery Jackson, Peter Amua-Quarshi, and others
- Narrated by: Margaret Winston
- Length: 7 hrs and 25 mins
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There are a lot of personality tests out there designed to label you and put you in a particular box. But Dr. Caroline Leaf says there's much more to you than a personality profile can capture. In fact, you cannot be categorized! In this fascinating book, she takes listeners through seven steps to rediscover and unlock their unique "you quotient".
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Hands down, the most helpful book I've listened to
- By Rose O'Connor on 07-31-17
By: Dr. Caroline Leaf, and others
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Written by two world-renowned sleep and dream researchers, When Brains Dream debunks common myths while acknowledging the mysteries that persist around both the science and experience of dreaming.
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Should be "next-up" on your reading list!
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By: Antonio Zadra, and others
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Dreams of Light
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With Dream Yoga, Andrew Holecek guided us into Tibetan Buddhism’s nocturnal path to lucid dreaming. Here, he offers in-depth instruction in the tradition’s daytime practices. “Waking experience is also a type of dream”, teaches Holecek, “and things are not as solid and real as we think. This insight is what transforms a non-lucid life into a lucid one.” For those drawn to Tibet’s profound teachings for awakening to the true nature of reality - in the day or night - this guide shows us the way.
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Highly enjoyable, but how useful is it actually to spiritual practice?
- By Sunyata on 11-11-21
By: Andrew Holecek
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The Age of Insight
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- By: Eric R. Kandel
- Narrated by: James Anderson Foster
- Length: 16 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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A brilliant book by Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight takes us to Vienna 1900, where leaders in science, medicine, and art began a revolution that changed forever how we think about the human mind - our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions - and how mind and brain relate to art.
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Worth the listen
- By Amazon Customer on 01-28-19
By: Eric R. Kandel
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The Mind of God
- Neuroscience, Faith, and a Search for the Soul
- By: Dr. Jay Lombard
- Narrated by: David Acord
- Length: 5 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Is there a God? It's a question billions of people have asked since the dawn of time. You would think by now we'd have a satisfactory, universal answer. No such luck...or maybe we do and we just need to look in the right place. For Dr. Jay Lombard that place is the brain, and more importantly the mind, that center of awareness and consciousness that creates reality. In The Mind of God, Dr. Lombard employs case studies from his own behavioral neurology practice to explore the spiritual conundrums that we all ask ourselves.
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Keenly insightful
- By Rick Smith on 09-30-19
By: Dr. Jay Lombard
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Philosophy of Mind: Bolinda Beginner Guides
- By: Edward Feser
- Narrated by: Andrea Powell
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In this lively and entertaining introduction to the philosophy of mind, Edward Feser explores the questions central to the discipline, and relates them not only to the human brain and its capacity for thought, but also to the increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence. This in-depth primer is an account of all the most important and significant attempts that have been made to answer the riddles of consciousness and thought.
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Author is a Christian apologist, and it shows
- By David Penn on 08-30-15
By: Edward Feser
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About Behaviorism
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About Behaviorism is about the controversial philosophy known as behaviorism, written by its leading exponent.
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A must listen
- By Maggie on 11-10-23
By: B.F. Skinner
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What listeners say about The Ego Tunnel
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Esmeralda
- 03-17-10
non-specialist literature at its best
An intelligent, thought-provoking book from a philosopher who likes to conduct experiments. Written in a very understandable style, without shying away from difficult words: non-specialist literature at its best.
The narration is excellent: interesting, varied, with a good sense of distinction between main sentence and subordinate clauses and no hesitation before uncommon words. One of those audio books that makes me long for my commute.
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16 people found this helpful
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- Maggie
- 11-20-10
poppycock
where are the peers who should be vetting this writer's ideas before it is turned into a book?! this thesis is a matrix built on air and shadow being passed off as actual science. in addition to this nothingness, the writer returns us to the bad ideas of past chemical applications. better living through chemistry was duponts slogan from 1935-1986 with an increase in cancer and environmental pollution as the result. psychedelic experiments reached the heights in the 1960s with dead or brain dead folks taking the brunt of those "good times." the thalidomide birth defects (late 1950s) should be warning enough for the next century and a half! have we learned NOTHING?
and then there are the work's futuristic ideas ... based solely on the writer's imagination, not science ... not even hypothesis just absurd speculation. has anyone checked on this guys credentials?!
i'm especially disappointed because i was looking for an intelligent discussion of consciousness, the ego, and human nature. boy did i NOT get that hope fulfilled! this book was a total waste of my time, and the only audience for this book would have to be science fiction writers.
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12 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Hasan
- 01-14-10
explorations on the margins of self
Strongly recommend this excellent work which brings modern neurobiological research and its philosophical implications.Reflections on broad spectrum which ranges From the formation of concsiousness to the rise of sense of self,future of sense of self and how this would play out in technology,economy and culture in near and distant future.This book is full of new ideas or new angles of looking at age old problems i,e consciousness,self,will and so on and so forth.
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12 people found this helpful
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- Paul
- 01-28-13
The Beginning of a Moral Storm
Lots of folks would be really angry if the scientific community said human beings were no more than very exotic machines. Yet as philosophers team up with neuro-scientists they are explaining the formerly unexplainable (perhaps spiritual) with measurable physical processes. To equate feelings with a chemical reaction in the brain is hard for some of us to believe. Yet what many humans believe about reality is also hard to believe. And so I found this book reached out to meet some of my own beliefs by treating philosophy and science less like oil and water.
It's hard to envision that all your reality is going on in your brain/mind based on a model you have evolved there from the many, many stimuli you've accumulated since birth. I can't share in your model but it's there in a tangible form of chemical and molecular configurations. But in very, very, very tiny ways neurobiologists are beginning to be able to read your mind/brain.
The Ego Tunnel reminds us that we are really living inside our heads because the flow of sights, sounds, feelings, etc. all end up in our brains where we manage it all into some sense (a model) of who we are, what is all about us and how we relate to it and them.
At this point in the book it's pretty easy to say, "So what." and switch to a murder mystery to listen to. But what I take away from this book is that you don't need more than a mixture of chemical elements to build a senescent being. This shakes up a lot of philosophical and spiritual thinkers who always added a non-material item to the physical ingredients that make up human beings. Can chemistry do what only spirit was supposed to be able to do?
Perhaps I am reading too much into the Ego Tunnel but I kinda like the ideas it is investigating.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Jay
- 09-16-12
Everything about this book sounds good...but...
What did you like best about The Ego Tunnel? What did you like least?
I try and finish a book even if I don't like it too much. However, I gave up on this book at the end of part 1, making it one of the few books I've purchased and not finished.
The subject matter is interesting. The reader did a good job. Based on my recent reading history, this should have been a four or five-star read for me.
The book is very technical and moves at a fast pace, and for some reason, it is like there are no points made...at junctures in the book where there should have been more of a point made, in my opinion.
I don't mind technical, it is one of the reasons I picked this book, because I wanted it to be scientific. But, there is something about the pace of the book, the jargon used, and the lack of solid conclusions that made this a very hard book to focus on. If words went in my ears, it was translated to something like, "blah, blah, blah."
A battle of (free) wills? I did really try to follow this book, but it was like that little man in my head kept whispering, "turn it off."
Note that I did give it three stars, because it isn't a total waste of time. Several areas were covered that made me want to explore them deeper in the future.
How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?
Slow it down a little bit, and make a little more effort at actually making a point instead of just presenting information at breakneck speed.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Sarah
- 04-26-17
Good with a few caveats
An interesting foray into Consciousness studies, and definitely worth the listen for his perspective on the self, ideas of evolution, artificial intelligence, lucid dreaming and Altered States. However, Thomas Metzinger, a German philosopher, all too frequently throughout his argument of consciousness alludes to notions that derive from the enlightenment or Rene Descartes in his quest for an increasing rationality of human beings, and occasionally saying some quite offensive, colonizing remarks on indigenous societies and religion, especially in his concluding remarks about consciousness, and he fails to take the hard problem seriously because he thinks of consciousness as a virtual Oregon, and that phenomenal state-space is somehow fully replicable by the brain and represents fully what Consciousness is. It is clear that his religion is indeed philosophy and science, but he would have done better to be cognizant of his position and not fall into the same rationalist seeking explanations as have many others before him. Still a good book.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Lazlo Shorts
- 07-15-18
The title is great, the reading is not.
This is an extremely important (and difficult) book, made more difficult by the narrator, who seems to need to pause every two or three words, as if, there were, sentences full of, commas. Rarely is a sentence read through. In general, I have a problem with the narrators on Audible because they seem to think they're performing for me, and often with great pretension, when all that I really want is for them to read to me. (Sadly, my wife doesn't have the time to read all these books to me.) Audible should encourage more natural speech.
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- Rodrigo Oliveri
- 06-21-18
Excelent
I really enjoy The book and Metzinger's depth un every topic. It was a mind blowing audiobook, very well narrated
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- Terry
- 02-18-24
You could guess the thesis.
Save ya time: We’re brains making egos and generating a self to tunnel endless data into a pretty reliable simulation of the world. There is no self since the self is just an organ’s interface.
We’re just the artifact of meat trying to stay alive.
There’s an apologetic cooler at the end that is cute.
It’s an intellectual but semi-nihilistic exercise.
It’s ok to keep a ghost in the machine, you’re more than this explanation.
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- Pasternak
- 09-04-21
Another breathless explanation for everything
Question: What does one get when one forces two natural enemies- neuroscience and phenomenology - together into a tiny space? Answer: Tunnel Vision.
There’s too much to complain about here in any useful detail. It maybe enough to say Metzinger’s vision - his definition of human consciousness - is too narrow, and too personal or subjective to be considered a product of science. Yet, the argument he makes is also ironically dismissive of the value of phenomenological experience. The brain is a filter that protects each of us from electromagnetic chaos is the claim (I buy this). The mind? Well, never mind. Semiotics - the tool of phenomenology - is worthless. The content of the unconscious- the content of dreams are worthless. The self-described psychonaught and soul traveler fails to mentions a thing about psychedelics. Yet he, somehow, manages to have seemingly countless out-of-body experiences without them (What?). The thing that bothers me most about these popular explanations for everything is how inelegant these arguments often are. This book is a product of engineering. You can almost see Metzinger pulling the levers of persuasion on every page. I might hope the final explanation for everything might feel more like an opening door- a revelation - when it arrives.
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