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The "user Illusion" of this groundbreaking book's
title comes from computer design and refers to the simplistic mental image most
of us have of our PCs. Our consciousness, says Norretranders, is our user illusion
of ourselves. During any given second, we consciously
process only sixteen of the eleven million bits of information our senses pass
on to our brains. In other words, the conscious part of us receives much less
information than the unconscious part of us. We should trust our hunches and pursue
our intuitions because they are closer to reality than the perceived reality of
consciousness. In fact, most of what we call thought
is actually the unconscious discarding of information. What our consciousness
rejects constitutes the most valuable part of ourselves, the "Me" that
the "I" draws on for most of our actions -- fluent speech, riding a
bicycle, anything involving expertise. Since this discarding takes time, there's
a half-second delay between reality and our perception of it. If a baseball player
thought about swinging at a pitch, he'd never hit the ball. The
User Illusion makes the case that humans are designed for a much richer existence
than processing a dribble of data from a computer screen, which actually constitutes
a form of sensory deprivation. That there is actually far too little information
in the so-called Information Age may be responsible for the malaise of modern
society, that nagging feeling that there must be more to life. There is -- but
we have to get outside and live life with all our senses to experience it more
fully. Drawing on wildly disparate areas of scientific
research, Tor Norretranders has made a compelling case for putting consciousness
in perspective and embracing all that the world has to offer.
Tor Norretranders is Denmark's leading science writer and the award-winning
author of more than ten books, many of them bestsellers. He has hosted numerous
television programs on science and science-related topics and established a major
cooperative network of scientists and artists. He lives north of Copenhagen. |
