The book is divided into 10 chapters, organized by subject:
The question is not just “How do we look inside the brain?” but “How do we talk about what’s there once we can see it?” There are a number of ways to get an idea about how your brain is structured (from measuring responses on the outside to taking pictures of the inside)—that’s half of this chapter. The other half speaks to the second question: we’ll take in some of the sights, check out the landmarks, and explore the geography of the brain.
The visual system runs all the way from the way we move our eyes to how we reconstruct and see movement from raw images. Sight’s an important sense to us; it’s high bandwidth and works over long distances (unlike, say, touch), and that’s reflected in the size of this chapter.
One of the mechanisms we use to filter information before it reaches conscious awareness is attention. Attention is sometimes voluntary (you can pay attention) and sometimes automatic (things can be attention-grabbing)—here we’re looking at what it does and some of its limitations.
Sounds usually correspond to events; a noise usually means something’s just happened. We’ll have a look at what our ears are good for, then move on to language and some of the ways we find meaning in words and sentences.
It’s rare we operate using just a single sense; we make full use of as much information as we can find, integrating sight, touch, our propensity for language, and other inputs. When senses agree, our perception of the world is sharper. We’ll look at how we mix up modes of operating (and how we can’t help doing so, even when we don’t mean to) and what happens when senses disagree.
This chapter covers the body—how the image the brain has of our body is easy to confuse and also how we use our body to interact with the world. There’s an illusion you can walk around, and we’ll have a little look at handedness too.
We’re not built to be perfect logic machines; we’re shaped to get on as well as possible in the world. Sometimes that shows up in the kind of puzzles we’re good at and the sort of things we’re duped by.
The senses give us much to go by, to reconstruct what’s going on in the universe. We can’t perceive cause and effect directly, only that two things happen at roughly the same time in roughly the same place. The same goes for complex objects: why see a whole person instead of a torso, head, and collection of limbs? Our reconstruction of objects and causality follow simple principles, which we use in this chapter.
We wouldn’t be human if we weren’t continually learning and changing, becoming different people. This chapter covers how learning begins at the level of memory over very short time periods (minutes, usually). We’ll also look at how a few of the ways we learn and remember manifest themselves.
Other people are a fairly special part of our environment, and it’s fair to say our brains have special ways of dealing with them. We’re great at reading emotions, and we’re even better at mimicking emotions and other people in general—so good we often can’t help it. We’ll cover both of those.
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