my mind on books

Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain by Antonio Damasio (Pantheon, 2010) is officially due out next Tues (Nov 9) but I saw it today at my local bookstore.
(link for amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

One of the most important and original neuroscientists at work today tackles a question that has confounded neurologists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, and psychologists for centuries: how consciousness is created.

Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years studying and writing about how the brain operates, and his work has garnered acclaim for its singular melding of the scientific and the humanistic. In this revelatory work, he debunks the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, presenting astounding new scientific evidence that consciousness—what we think of as “self”—is in fact a biological process created by the brain. Besides the three traditional perspectives used to study the mind (the personal, the behavioral, and the neurological), Damasio introduces the evolutionary perspective, which entails a radical change in the way the history of conscious minds is viewed and told.

Self Comes to Mind is a groundbreaking investigation of consciousness as a dynamic, unpredictable faculty that is instrumental in defining and explaining who we understand ourselves to be.

See also: Website for the book, including a series of video interviews and a preview of the book