Medicine, Society, and Faith in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds Book

Of course the older language takes some getting used to but for a 100+ year old book, the authors had surprising insight into cognition viewed experientially, rather than experimentally. That is, the author was able to conduct many experiments but, lacking the technology to directly observe the physical substrate, e.g. neuronal firing, heart rate, etc, the conclusions are based on descriptions of introspective states.

One path that I look for in all of my favorite books, is an underlying story or compelling metaphor that we find applied in other, seemingly unrelated, stories...a gelling narrative such as identifying common elements the hero's journey from different world myths and religious texts. This book has achieved this by its analysis of dream and somnambulistic states as they relate to not only our own latent, or "unconscious," powers of perception but to those even of a primitive shaman.

We tend to get pretty cocky about the "silliness" of past science but, the fact is, all of our imaging technologies combined can't really tell us how we perform the most common sense tasks, or tell us anything really about our own introspective states. By extension, they can do very little to quantify the full range of our mental ( abilities. For example, although we account for the "Placebo Effect" in drug trials, we still can't explain the fact that there really *is* a Placebo effect. People really are getting better, apparently based solely on their believe, i.e. their own introspective state, that they are receiving an beneficial medicine.

This book attempts to address the true nature of these states by an analogous survey of similar phenomena, e.g. dreams, hypnotism and somnambulism.