Wegner/The Illusion of Conscious Will: BBS Multiple Book Review

Below is a link to the forthcoming precis of a book accepted for Multiple Book Review in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS). PRECIS OF: The Illusion of Conscious Will by Daniel M. Wegner PRECIS: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Wegner-05012003/Referees/ Please note that it is the *BOOK*, not the precis, that is to be reviewed. Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), is an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Reviewers must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a reviewer for this book, to suggest other appropriate reviewers, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL within four (4) weeks to: calls(a)bbsonline.org The Calls are sent to over 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no need to reply except if you wish to review this book, or to nominate someone to review. If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. A full electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate reviewer for this book, an electronic draft of the precis is retrievable at the URL included in this email. ======================================================================= *** IMPORTANT *** Please do not prepare a review unless you are formally invited. To help us put together a balanced list of reviewers, it would be most helpful if you would send us as specific as possible an indication of the relevant expertise you would bring to bear on the subject, and what aspect of the book you would anticipate commenting upon. We will then let you know whether it was possible to include your name on the final formal list of invitees. NOTE: Please indicate whether you already have the book or would require a review copy to be sent to you if invited. ======================================================================= PRECIS OF: The Illusion of Conscious Will Daniel M. Wegner Department of Psychology Harvard University ABSTRACT: The experience of conscious will is the feeling that we're doing things. This feeling occurs for many things we do, conveying to us again and again the sense that we consciously cause our actions. But the feeling may not be a true reading of what is happening in our minds, brains, and bodies as our actions are produced. The feeling of conscious will can be fooled. This happens in clinical disorders such as alien hand syndrome, dissociative identity disorder, and schizophrenic auditory hallucinations. And in people without disorders, phenomena such as hypnosis, automatic writing, Ouija board spelling, water dowsing, facilitated communication, speaking in tongues, spirit possession, and trance channeling also illustrate anomalies of will-cases when actions occur without will, or will occurs without action. This book brings these cases together with research evidence from laboratories in psychology and neuroscience to explore a theory of apparent mental causation. According to this theory, when a thought appears in consciousness just prior to an action, is consistent with the action, and appears exclusive of salient alternative causes of the action, we experience conscious will and ascribe authorship to ourselves for the action. Experiences of conscious will thus arise from processes whereby the mind interprets itself-not from processes whereby mind creates action. Conscious will, in this view, is an indication that we think we have caused an action, not a revelation of the causal sequence by which the action was produced. KEYWORDS: conscious will; free will; determinism; apparent mental causation; automatism; perceived control PRECIS: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Wegner-05012003/Referees/ ====================================================================== *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT *** (1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review. (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential impact!). *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Please note: Your email address has been added to our user database for Calls for Commentators, the reason you received this email. If you do not wish to receive further Calls, please feel free to change your mailshot status through your User Login link on the BBSPrints homepage, using your username and password. Or, email a response with the word "remove" in the subject line. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Thanks, Ralph BBS ------------------------------------------------------------------- Ralph DeMarco Editorial Coordinator Behavioral and Brain Sciences Journals Department Cambridge University Press 40 West 20th Street New York, NY 10011-4211 UNITED STATES bbs(a)bbsonline.org http://www.bbsonline.org Tel: +001 212 924 3900 ext.374 Fax: +001 212 645 5960 -------------------------------------------------------------------