554 BOOK REVIEWS

PROBLEMS O F CONSCIOUSNESS. Third Conference, March 10 and 11, 1952, Ed. HAROLD A. ABRAMSON, New York City. The Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation. 156 pages. $3.25.

Three major topics were discussed, Consciousness and Metabolism of the Brain by Seymour S. Kety on 62 pages, Hypnotic Phenomena by Lewis R. Wolberg on 30 pages, and Experimental work on Sleep and other variations of Consciousness by Marcel Monnier on 48 pages.

During the first presentation which started out as one would expect on a st,rictly physiological level people tried (in vain, of course) to define consciousness over many pages and only towards the end were brought up short by Rapaport who reminded them that this was really Kety ’s presentation and that Kety ’s data should be discussed. It seems extremely hard to realize that consciousness is one of the “ur-erlebnisse” which cannot be defined in simpler terms. The second part is largely a case history of two hypnoses. The third chapter is again on a more physiological level and contains many interesting observations. Towards the end on page 149, Lindsley brings in Me- Culloch’s theory about the alpha rhythm as a scanning device which by now I think has been pretty thoroughly exploded.

There are 37 references to the first chapter, one for the second, and 20 for the third, arranged in the order of their appearance. So far as a superficial glance can tell there is no over-lap between one and three. The book is well printed and should be of interest to anybody who deals with the nervous system, including psychiatrists.

GERHARDT VON BONIN

Received a t the Edi tor ia l Ofice JOURNAL O F THE ANATOMICAL SOCIETY OF INDIA. Editor, Dr.

Hiren Chatterjee f o r the Anatomical Society of India. S. K. Basu, President.

WORLD MEDICAL ASSOCIATION BULLETIN, Vol. 5, No. 2. April, 1953. Editor, Dr. Morris Fishbein.