The Secret Life of the Mind: How Our Brain Thinks, Feels and Decides电子书

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Contents

Introduction

1: The origin of thought

The genesis of concepts

Atrophied and persistent synaesthesias

The mirror between perception and action

Piaget’s mistake!

The executive system

The secret in their eyes

Development of attention

The language instinct

Mother tongue

The children of Babel

A conjecturing machine

The good, the bad and the ugly

He who robs a thief …

The colour of a jersey, strawberry or chocolate

Émile and Minerva’s owl

I, me, mine and other permutations by George

Transactions in the playground, or the origin of commerce and theft

Jacques, innatism, genes, biology, culture and an image

2: The fuzzy borders of identity

Churchill, Turing and his labyrinth

Turing’s brain

Turing in the supermarket

The tell-tale heart

The body in the casino and at the chessboard

Rational deliberation or hunches?

Sniffing out love

Believing, knowing, trusting

Confidence: flaws and signatures

The nature of optimists

Odysseus and the consortium we belong to

Flaws in confidence

Others’ gazes

The inner battles that make us who we are

The chemistry and culture of confidence

The seeds of corruption

The persistence of social trust

To sum up …

3: The machine that constructs reality

Lavoisier, the heat of consciousness

Pyschology in the prehistory of neuroscience

Freud working in the dark

Free will gets up off the couch

The interpreter of consciousness

‘Performiments’: freedom of expression

The prelude to consciousness

In short: the circle of consciousness

The physiology of awareness

Reading consciousness

Observing the imagination

Shades of consciousness

Do babies have consciousness?

4: Voyages of consciousness (or consciousness tripping)

Altered states of consciousness

Nocturnal elephants

The uroboros plot

Deciphering dreams

Daydreams

Lucid dreaming

Voyages of consciousness

The factory of beatitude

The cannabic frontier

Towards a positive pharmacology

The consciousness of Mr X

The lysergic repertoire

Hoffman’s dream

The past and the future of consciousness

The future of consciousness: is there a limit to mind-reading?

5: The brain is constantly transforming

Virtue, oblivion, learning, and memory

The universals of human thought

The illusion of discovery

Learning through scaffolding

Effort and talent

Ways of learning

The OK threshold

The history of human virtue

Fighting spirit and talent: Galton’s two errors

The fluorescent carrot

The geniuses of the future

Memory palace

The morphology of form

A monster with slow processors

Our inner cartographers

Fluorescent triangles

The parallel brain and the serial brain

Learning: a bridge between two pathways in the brain

The repertoire of functions: learning is compiling

Automatizing reading

The ecology of alphabets

The morphology of the word

The two brains of reading

The temperature of the brain

6:Educated brains

The sound of the letters

Word-tied

What we have to unlearn

The framework of thought

Parallelawhat?

Gestures and words

Good, bad, yes, no, OK

The teaching instinct

Spikes of culture

Docendo discimus

Epilogue

Appendix

Footnotes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher