My views on consciousness did not develop in a void. Over the past thirty years, I have been immersed in a cloud of ideas and surrounded by a dream team of colleagues who often became close friends. I am especially indebted to three of them. In the early 1990s, my mentor Jean-Pierre Changeux first suggested to me that the problem of consciousness may not be out of reach, and that we could attack it jointly from the empirical and theoretical sides. My friend Laurent Cohen then pointed me to a variety of highly pertinent neuropsychological cases. He also introduced me to Lionel Naccache, then a young medical student, now a brilliant neurologist and cognitive neuroscientist, with whom we explored the depth of subliminal processing. Our collaborations and discussions have never ceased. Jean-Pierre, Laurent, Lionel, thank you for your constant encouragement and friendship.
Paris has become an important hub for consciousness research. My laboratory greatly benefited from this stimulating environment, and I am especially grateful for the enlightening discussions I shared with Patrick Cavanagh, Sid Kouider, Jérôme Sackur, Etienne Koechlin, Kevin O’Regan, and Mathias Pessiglione. Many bright students and postdocs, often supported by the Fyssen Foundation or the excellent master’s program in cognitive science at the École Normale Supérieure, enriched my lab with their energy and creativity. My gratitude goes to my Ph.D. students Lucie Charles, Antoine Del Cul, Raphael Gaillard, Jean-Rémi King, Claire Sergent, Mélanie Strauss, Lynn Uhrig, Catherine Wacongne, and Valentin Wyart, and to my postdoctoral colleagues Tristan Bekinschtein, Floris de Lange, Sébastien Marti, Kimihiro Nakamura, Moti Salti, Aaron Schurger, Jacobo Sitt, Simon van Gaal, and Filip Van Opstal for their ceaseless questions and ideas. Special thanks to Mariano Sigman for ten years of fruitful collaboration, generous sharing, and simple friendship.
Insights on consciousness come from a great variety of disciplines, labs, and researchers throughout the world. I am particularly glad to acknowledge conversations with Bernard Baars (the mind behind the first version of global workspace theory), Moshe Bar, Edoardo Bisiach, Olaf Blanke, Ned Block, Antonio Damasio, Dan Dennett, Derek Denton, Gerry Edelman, Pascal Fries, Karl Friston, Chris Frith, Uta Frith, Mel Goodale, Tony Greenwald, John-Dylan Haynes, Biyu Jade He, Nancy Kanwisher, Markus Kiefer, Christof Koch, Victor Lamme, Dominique Lamy, Hakwan Lau, Steve Laureys, Nikos Logothetis, Lucia Melloni, Earl Miller, Adrian Owen, Josef Parvizi, Dan Pollen, Michael Posner, Alex Pouget, Marcus Raichle, Geraint Rees, Pieter Roelfsema, Niko Schiff, Mike Shadlen, Tim Shallice, Kimron Shapiro, Wolf Singer, Elizabeth Spelke, Giulio Tononi, Wim Vanduffel, Larry Weiskrantz, Mark Williams, and many others.
My research received long-term support from the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives (CEA), the Collège de France, Université Paris Sud, and the European Research Council. The NeuroSpin center, located south of Paris and headed by Denis Le Bihan, provided a stimulating environment in which to pursue this highly speculative topic, and I am thankful for the support and advice of my local colleagues, including Gilles Bloch, Jean-Robert Deverre, Lucie Hertz-Pannier, Bechir Jarraya, Andreas Kleinschmidt, Jean-François Mangin, Bertrand Thirion, Gaël Varoquaux, and Virginie van Wassenhove.
While writing this book, I benefited from the hospitality of several other institutions, notably the Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies in Vancouver, Macquarie University in Sydney, the Institute for Advanced Studies IUSS in Pavia, the Fondation des Treilles in southern France, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the Vatican, . . . and La Chouannière and La Trinitaine, my family’s hideaways, where many of these lines were written.
My agent John Brockman, together with his son Max Brockman, initially played an instrumental role in pushing me to write this book. Melanie Tortoroli, at Viking, patiently corrected its many successive versions. I also benefited from two readings by the sharp yet benevolent eyes of Sid Kouider and Lionel Naccache.
Last but not least, my wife Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz shared with me not only her amazing knowledge of all that concerns the baby’s brain and mind but also the love and tenderness that make life worth living and consciousness worth having.