Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World by Chris Frith, Christopher D. Frith

List of Abbreviations     ix
Preface     x
Acknowledgments     xi
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
Seeing through the Brain's Illusions     19
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
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
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
There's Nothing Wrong with Me     74
Who's Doing It?     75
Where Is the "You"?     77
How the Brain Does It     83
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
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
How Brains Model Minds     139
Biological Motion: The Way Living Things Move     140
How Movements Can Reveal Intentions     141
Imitation     144
Imitation: Perceiving the Goals of Others     145
Humans and Robots     148
Empathy     149
The Experience of Agency     151
The Problem with Privileged Access     155
Illusions of Agency     156
Hallucinating Other Agents     157
Culture and the Brain     161
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     294
Illustrations and Text Credits     218
Index     226