"'The last great mystery for science', consciousness has now become a hot topic, and exciting new developments in brain science have opened the field to biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers. This introduction to the subject considers whether we really have free will and what creates our sense of self, and explores some of the key theories, including recent experiments on action and awareness, vision and attention, altered states of consciousness, and the effects of brain damage and drugs. Questioning whether consciousness itself may be an illusion, Susan Blackmore makes clear the enormous difficulty facing scientists and philosophers as they struggle to bridge the profound gap between the physical world and your private experiences of it."--BOOK JACKET.