A Precious and Fragile Gift

States of Mind: Tracing the Edges of Consciousness, London, until 16 October 2016 ‘. . . the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.’

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

There’s a point in childhood when we all ask: ‘Who am I? What makes me, me and not someone else?’ From the infant to the philosopher the need to understand consciousness has remained, despite the advances of science, an abiding puzzle. What does it mean to be a sentient individual, to have a subjective life? Can our essence best be found in the insights of neuroscience or art, poetry, philosophy or, even, religion? Where does the real ‘us’ reside? In States of Mind: Tracing the Edges of Consciousness the Wellcome Institute has produced another intriguing exhibition that melds different disciplines to examine the discourses around conscious experience. The implication is that one discipline alone cannot provide definitive insight into this universal mystery. As the curator Emily Sargent suggests: ‘Consciousness . . . is as magical as it is everyday. We all know what it is like to be conscious, but it remains a challenge to truly define it’.

The first of four sections, SCIENCE/SOUL, takes as its starting point the emergence of neuroscience. The concept of dualism, the separation of Mind and Body that coloured Enlightenment thinking was first, formally, conceived by René Descartes in the seventeenth century. The division between the inanimate body and the conscious soul in the last moments of