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Rating: 
Summary: Badly misinformed science
Review: The basis of this book is that consciousness can be explained as a Bose-Einstein condensate of atoms in the neurons. Interesting idea, sadly impossible. Bose-Einstein condensates can only exist at very low temperatures. The inside of the brain certainly doesn't qualify. The authors could've easily established the impossibility of their claim by looking up B-E condensates in any textbook on statistical mechanics.
Rating:
Summary: Badly misinformed science
Review: The idea of trying to define consciousness and understand it in a scientific context is something I'm highly interested in. This book has some great ideas which I find highly intriguing, but to be convincing the author needs a stronger foundaiton in science. For instance, she constantly refers to neurons as having "cell walls", but a freshman college science major would no that no animal cell has a cell wall, period. This leads me to wonder how informed Zohar may be on the other scientific issues, such as physics, in this book. That sais, I think she's on the right track, and thinking about the subject in the proper way. But i think we need to look for more authoritative scientific sources on the subject, such as Roger Penrose...
Rating: 
Summary: Good Ideas, needs stronger scientific background
Review: The idea of trying to define consciousness and understand it in a scientific context is something I'm highly interested in. This book has some great ideas which I find highly intriguing, but to be convincing the author needs a stronger foundaiton in science. For instance, she constantly refers to neurons as having "cell walls", but a freshman college science major would no that no animal cell has a cell wall, period. This leads me to wonder how informed Zohar may be on the other scientific issues, such as physics, in this book. That sais, I think she's on the right track, and thinking about the subject in the proper way. But i think we need to look for more authoritative scientific sources on the subject, such as Roger Penrose...
Rating: 
Summary: Thought provoking, interesting read
Review: This book is a must for anyone having an acquaintance with the puzzles posed by quantum theory and a sense that they might have something to do with consciousness, but that the ideas posed so far in answering such questions are inadequate. Zohar's intriguing thesis is that subjective awareness arises directly from quantum processes and that the wave-particle duality (or unity, as Yilmaz calls it) of quantum theory underlies the mind-body duality (or unity) familiar to all of us raised in the Cartesian tradition. My only criticism is that Zohar engages in the all-too-familiar Newton- and Descartes-bashing that has become so popular lately. If one reads Newton's original writings, it is clear that he is not advocating a mechanistic world view but only a method of inquiry in which "formal causes" (as Aristotle would say) are substituted for attempts to find material and final causes. Thus mathematical relationships, rather than purposes and specific qualities of physical objects, became primary in Newton's method. It was in virtue of this insight that the new physics ever become possible at all. Similarly, it is the analytical techniques that Descartes pioneered which have made possible the discoveries that Zohar interprets so compellingly. That criticism aside, this is an excellent book with a revolutionary idea that deserves to be taken seriously.
Rating:
Summary: Very thought-provoking
Review: This book is highly informative and thought provoking although some of the ideas behind it are confusing. For example, as someone else mentioned, neurones don't have cell walls, because no animal cells have cell walls. And also, the author does not explain the hypothetical Bose-Einstein condensate in the brain very well, even though the idea is one of the central ideas behind the book, nor why it has to be in the brain. The "Frohlich pumped system", if it is indeed responsible for consciousness, it would only require energy, which is existent throughout the human body. Moreover, it is unclear how such a pumped system would come about in the human body, and how it would have been created in the first place through evolution. However, these shortcomings are more than made up by revolutionary ideas (even for now, a decade later), its interpretation of "relationship", and its reasonable scientific backing. No, the real reason I gave it a 4 stars and not 5 is because the middle chapters are kind of repetitive, culminating in a rather hideous chapter "Getting beyond narcissism" which was neither relevant nor philosophically sound. But the last couple of chapters were excellent, and I'd certainly recommend this to any open-minded science buffs (not to laymen, however). Of the many books written about the new physics, this is one of the most precise, and is apparently unafraid of skepticism, which I respect even if it means instigating more erroneous rants about "New Ageist science" is rampant and the "real science" is not from an ill-informed skeptic.
Rating: 
Summary: Tolstoy said it first . . .
Review: Zohar effectively breaks out of Conventional Wisdom's monologue on human consciousness with her "Quantum Self". It is sometimes a difficult task to use the language of today's thought to describe tomorrow's. It is understandable, therefore, when Zohar dips into her personal stash of religious metaphors to describe a world that is decidedly metaphysical. A few religious references may come as an unpleasant surprise at first read, to the self-described universalist, but an open-minded reader will easily see the broader truths being espoused without marriage to a specific western or eastern point of view. It is impossible to stop an idea whose time has come. This book takes us a step closer to a unifying theory of consciousness, matter, and phases of existence.
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