Compelling and accessible

Noë presents his and other people's research very clearly and makes a good case for studying consciousness in the wider context of our action in the world with others. The one downside is that the narrator consistently mispronounces 'causal' as 'casual'.

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Proof reading?

The narrator seems not to know that ‘causal’ is a different word to ‘casual’. This makes some of the sections exceptionally confusing. There are other misreading errors: ‘traveller, there is no pain, you make the path by walking it’. Also physical and psychical mean different things. It’s a really great book but I spent too long having to pause and reverse engineer from what was said to what I think the author intended….

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done so much better by other writers

I am having trouble finishing this book, so I know my review can be shot down in flames! In fact I'm pretty sure I'm going to return it unfinished.
Firstly its style is so convoluted and heavy going that it is boring, hard to follow and unrewarding. This isn't helped by a narrator who reads as if every sentence has an exclamation mark after it, as though the writer is forever amazed by what he has written. He uses little homely happenings or poorly described neuroscience experiments and then builds on them far in excess of what they can actually support - he just sort of riffs off, with no care whether the starting point actually justifies his conclusions.

Closely related is that the substance is nonsense - not wrong, just obvious and years out of date. No-one nowadays is suggesting that consciousness is exactly caused by and is the same as brain states.

I did wonder whether I had completely missed the point - I'm not a professional neuroscientist or philosopher - I'm a psychiatrist with a keen interest in consciousness/mind body problem etc. However, having read authors such as Daniel Dennett (Consciousness explained) and Mind, Meaning and Mental Disorder (Bolton and Hill) provide such rigorous, closely reasoned and ultimately much more readable/listenable works on similar topics, I don't think I have missed the point. Another couple of reviews seem to closely mirror my conclusions.

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