Thinking Beyond the Brain

"The important and tireless work the Scientific and Medical Network is doing to shift the boundaries defined by scientific materialism to find common ground between the material and non-material worlds is a keystone to a better understanding of the world and cosmos in which we all live." The science of consciousness continues to be a hot topic in academic circles - its precise nature holding huge implications for the future of the sciences and culture more generally. With so many ongoing advances in neuroscience, questions of mind and consciousness have become critically important for scientists, philosophers and psychologists. Are we "nothing but a pack of neurons" that will in due course reveal their secrets in the laboratory? Or do our conscious minds and self-awareness stem from some dimension beyond material investigation? How, too, are we to account for parapsychological phenomena in which consciousness seems to defy space and time boundaries? This anthology includes contributions from Peter Fenwick, Willis Harman, Stanislav Grof, Charles Tart, Kenneth Ring, Brian Josephson, Mark Woodhouse, Marilyn Schlitz, David Fontana, John Beloff, Erlendur Haraldsson, Michael Grosso, Andrew Powell, Roger Woolger, Ravi Ravindra and Anne Baring, with an introduction by David Lorimer. These radical contributions to the debate selected from the first three Beyond the Brain conferences show that it is time for a fundamental rethink of our theories and methods of investigating the phenomena of the human mind.