Zoltan Torey was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1929.
Matriculating in 1948, he escaped from Soviet-dominated Hungary
and emigrated to Australia.
Enrolled in the Faculty of Dentistry at the University of
Sydney, he met with an accident halfway through his second year
and lost his sight. After unsuccessful eye operations, he
returned to the University of Sydney in 1956 and enrolled in the
Faculty of Arts and in 1955 gained an honors degree in
psychology with philosophy as the second major.
Working as a consultant psychologist, he began his research
into the brain-mind-consciousness problem. His
neuroscience-based interdisciplinary work, The
Crucible of Consciousness, was first
published by Oxford University Press in 1999.
Encouraged by the eminent New York neurologist and author Dr.
Oliver Sacks, Zoltan Torey wrote his memoir, Out
of Darkness, which was published by Picador
(Pan MacMillan) in 2003. The book includes a foreword by Dr.
Sacks, who also wrote about Torey's unusually successful
adjustment to blindness and power of visualization in an article
in the July 2003 issue of The New
Yorker.
Both his books have been translated and released in Hungary.
He writes science-based radio talks and articles, and has been a
guest speaker on many occasions, including events at Queensland
University, the Sydney Writers' Festival, the Neuroscience
Faculty of the University of Budapest, and the Center for
Consciousness Studies in Tucson, Arizona, where he was the
keynote speaker of the 2004 biennial conference. A second
edition of The Crucible of
Consciousness, with a foreword by Professor D.C.
Dennett, is scheduled for worldwide release by MIT Press in the Fall of 2006.
Zoltan Torey lives in Newcastle, N.S.W., Australia.
selected books
Out of Darkness
(Pan Macmillan Australia, 2004)
http://www.panmacmillan.com.au/
The Crucible of Consciousness : A Personal Exploration of the Conscious Mind(Oxford University Press, 1999)
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