What links conscious experience of pain, joy, color, and smell to bioelectrical activity in the brain? How can anything physical give rise to nonphysical, subjective, conscious states? Christof Koch has devoted much of his career to bridging the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the physics of the brain and phenomenal experience. This engaging book--part scientific overview, part memoir, part futurist speculation--describes Kochs search for an empirical explanation for consciousness. Koch recounts not only the birth of the modern science of consciousness but also the subterranean motivation for his quest--his instinctual (if "romantic") belief that life is meaningful.

My Erdös number is 3 (through Jonathan Harel, who published with Robert McElice who published in 1971 with Paul Erdös). This is far less than the median of 5 or the mean of 4.65. If you have written a scientific paper with me, your Erdös number will be 4.