List of Abbreviations Preface Acknowledgments

Prologue: Real Scientists Don’t Study the Mind 1

The Psychologist’s Fear of the Party 1

Hard Science and Soft Science 3

Hard Science ? Objective; Soft Science ? Subjective 5

Can Big Science Save Soft Science? 7

Measuring Mental Activity 9

How Can the Mental Emerge from the Physical? 15

I Can Read Your Mind 16

How the Brain Creates the World 16

Part I Seeing through the Brain’s Illusions 19

1 Clues from a Damaged Brain 21

Sensing the Physical World 21

The Mind and the Brain 22

When the Brain Doesn’t Know 24

When the Brain Knows, But Doesn’t Tell 27

When the Brain Tells Lies 29

How Brain Activity Creates False Knowledge 31

How to Make Your Brain Lie to You 34

Checking the Reality of Our Experiences 36

How Do We Know What’s Real? 37

2 What a Normal Brain Tells Us about the World 40

Illusions of Awareness 40

Our Secretive Brain 44

Our Distorting Brain 48

Our Creative Brain 50

3 What the Brain Tells Us about Our Bodies 61

Privileged Access? 61

Where’s the Border? 61

We Don’t Know What We Are Doing 64

Who’s in Control? 66

My Brain Can Act Perfectly Well without Me 68

Phantoms in the Brain 70

Part II How the Brain Does It 83

4 Getting Ahead by Prediction 85

Patterns of Reward and Punishment 85

How the Brain Embeds Us in the World and Then Hides Us 100

The Feeling of Being in Control 105

When the System Fails 107

The Invisible Actor at the Center of the World 109

5 Our Perception of the World Is a Fantasy That Coincides with Reality 111

Our Brain Creates an Effortless Perception of the Physical World 111

The Information Revolution 112

What Can Clever Machines Really Do? 116

A Problem with Information Theory 117

The Reverend Thomas Bayes 119

The Ideal Bayesian Observer 123

How a Bayesian Brain Can Make Models of the World 125

Is There a Rhinoceros in the Room? 125

Where Does Prior Knowledge Come From? 127

How Action Tells Us about the World 130

My Perception Is Not of the World, But of My Brain’s Model of the World 132

Color Is in the Brain, Not in the World 134

Perception Is a Fantasy That Coincides with Reality 134

We Are Not the Slaves of Our Senses 135

So How Do We Know What’s Real? 136

Imagination Is Extremely Boring 137

6 How Brains Model Minds 139

Biological Motion: The Way Living Things Move 140

How Movements Can Reveal Intentions 141

Imitation 144

The Experience of Agency 151

The Problem with Privileged Access 155

Illusions of Agency 156

Hallucinating Other Agents 157

Part III Culture and the Brain 161

7 Sharing Minds ? How the Brain Creates Culture 163

The Problem with Translation 163

Meanings and Goals 165

Solving the Inverse Problem 166

Prior Knowledge and Prejudice 167

What Will He Do Next? 168

Other People Are Contagious 169

Communication Is More Than Just Speaking 170

Teaching Is Not Just a Demonstration To Be Imitated 171

Closing the Loop 173

Fork Handles: The Two Ronnies Close the Loop (Eventually) 174

Fully Closing the Loop 175

Knowledge Can Be Shared 175

Knowledge Is Power 177

The Truth 179

Epilogue: Me and My Brain 184

Chris Frith and I 184

Searching for the Will in the Brain 185

Where Is the Top in Top-Down Control? 186

The Homunculus 188

This Book Is Not About Consciousness 189

Why Are People So Nice (as Long as They Are Treated Fairly)? 190

Even an Illusion Has Responsibilities 191

The Evidence 194

Illustrations and Text Credits 218

Index 226