Severely underappreciated (IMO) is British psychiatrist Marion Milner's A Life of One's Own[1] (1934, as "Joanna Field") - an extraordinary recounting of the au

Severely underappreciated (IMO) is British psychiatrist Marion Milner's A Life of One's Own[1] (1934, as "Joanna Field") - an extraordinary recounting of the author's subjective yet diligent observational study of her own awareness and mental processes from first principles and with as few assumptions as possible. The results were unexpected! > As soon as I began to study my perception, to look at my own experience, I found that there were different ways of perceiving and that the different ways provided me with different facts. There was a narrow focus which meant seeing life as if from blinkers and with the centre of awareness in my head; and there was a wide focus which meant knowing with the whole of my body, a way of looking which quite altered my perception of whatever I saw. And I found that the narrow focus way was the way of reason. If one was in the habit of arguing about life it was very difficult not to approach sensation with the same concentrated attention and so shut out its width and depth and height. But it was the wide focus way that made me happy. The book is full of arresting and innovative insights on awareness and perception. For example, the spotlight analogy for "covert attention" is often attributed to Francis Crick writing in 1984[2], but fifty years earlier Milner writes: > At any moment there exist in the fringes of my thought faint patternings which can be brought to distinction when I look at them. Like a policeman with a flash-light I can throw the bright circle of my awareness where I choose; if any shadow or movement in the dim outer circle of its rays arouses my suspicion, I can make it come into the circle of brightness and show itself for what it is. But the beam of my attention is not of fixed width, I can widen or narrow it as I choose.[3] On the topic of first person recountings of mental journeys, but from the other side of the analyst's couch, it's also worth mentioning Operators and Things: The inner life of a schizophrenic[4] a powerful first person account of schizophrenic hallucination and ideation which comes across a little more like a novel than an objective account but is fascinating nonetheless. 1: https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/10/11/a-life-of-ones-own-joanna-field-marion-milner/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/10/11/a-life-of-ones-own-... 2: e.g. "(The analogy was first suggested by Francis Crick, the geneticist.)" - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/how-consciousness-evolved/485558/?single_page=true https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/how-cons... 3: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ntg6OE7haSgC&pg=PA77 https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ntg6OE7haSgC&pg=PA77 4: Online at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/13476 https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/13476 it seems - I read it in paperback in the 80s and only turned that site up with google just now, so ... but the PDF seems to work.