What is consciousness? Michael Pollan spent 4 years looking for answer

MELBOURNE: (Mar 29) Psychology, it’s said, has a long past but a short history. A popular version lists three stages.

First, around the turn of the 20th century, psychologists tried to capture the stream of conscious experience in the net of introspection. The behaviourists then declared the mind off limits, arguing that psychology should study observable behaviour rather than subjective experience.

Finally, the emergence of computers spurred the cognitive revolution of the 1960s, which brought the mind back in from the cold, in a new science of information processing.