Susan Blackmore is a psychologist, TED lecturer, and writer researching consciousness, memes, meditation, and anomalous experiences, and is Visiting Professor in Psychology at the University of Plymouth. The Meme Machine (1999) has been translated into 16 languages; more recent books include Zen and the Art of Consciousness (2011) and Seeing Myself: The New Science of Out-of-BodyExperiences (2017).

Emily T. Troscianko is a writer and researcher interested in mental health, readers' responses to literature, and how the two might be linked - as well as what both have to do with human consciousness. She is a Research Associate at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), University of Oxford, writes the blog 'A Hunger Artist' for Psychology Today, and has published a monograph, Kafka's Cognitive Realism (2014), exploring the strange phenomenon we call the 'Kafkaesque'.

Introduction, Section One: The problem, 1. What's the problem? 2. What's it like to be...? 3. The grand illusion, Section Two: The brain, 4. Neuroscience and the correlates of consciousness, 5. The theatre of the mind, 6. The unity of consciousness, Section Three: Body and world, 7. Attention, 8. Conscious and unconscious, 9. Agency and free will, Section Four: Evolution, 10. Evolution and animal minds, 11. The function of consciousness, 12. The evolution of machines, Section Five: Borderlands, 13. Altered states of consciousness, 14. Reality and imagination, 15. Dreaming and beyond, Section Six: Self and other, 16. Egos, bundles, and theories of self, 17. The view from within?, 18. Waking up