DANIEL BOR was born in 1975. He spent more than a decade working as a cognitive neuroscientist in the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge, where he is a visiting scientist, and is now also a research scientist at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex, UK. He has worked on many areas related to consciousness and the brain, and has published many academic papers, in journals such as Science and Neuron, on a range of topics, including frontal lobe function, consciousness, intelligence, memory, savantism and synaesthesia – work that has received considerable media coverage on radio and television and in newspapers. He has also taken a keen interest in communicating his research to the public, publishing popular science articles on the BBC’s website, as well as in the journal Current Biology, acting as an advisor on two television documentaries, presenting his research to MPs in the Houses of Parliament, and co-running a month-long public memory experiment in the Science Museum.

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Daniel Bor's website

In the past few years, researchers have discovered a wealth of fascinating evidence for what consciousness actually is, and how the brain generates it. As a neuroscientist with over a decade’s experience in the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University, Daniel Bor has been at the forefront of this work.

In RAVENOUS FOR WISDOM he describes the remarkable techniques, studies and theories that have led to this new understanding of ‘the intimately personal core that mentally defines us’; provides a novel model of how and why consciousness happens; and, for the first time in a book for a popular audience, looks at the implications of these latest findings for medicine, health and well being. In particular, he presents fresh radical views of depression, schizophrenia and autism and reveals how brain scanners may be used to detect residual consciousness in patients in a persistent vegetative state.

But this is more than just an authoritative, original and up-to-date survey of an exhilarating new field. Daniel Bor is a fine writer whose mix of personal experience, hard scientific research and philosophical reflection is reminiscent of Oliver Sacks’s deft use of his own clinical cases to educate a wide audience on the complexities and nuances of the human mind. It’s a captivating approach, that brings both charm and erudition to the neurological investigation of consciousness.

Still in his early thirties, Daniel Bor has now decided to take some time out of research to communicate his science more widely to the public with this, his first book – thus building on the writing he has already done for the BBC’s website and his advisory role on two television documentaries, including ‘Brainman’, shown on Channel 5 and the Discovery Channel, which was based on his work with the prodigy Daniel Tammett.

Publisher: Basic
Delivery: Autumn 2010
Publication: Spring 2011
Status: Proposal and sample chapter
Length: 90,000 words

World rights: Basic

For international rights contact Thomas Kelleher at Basic