Making up the mind : how the brain creates our mental world / Chris Frith.

Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, [2007?]

xii, 234 pages, 7 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm

Prologue: Real scientists don't study the mind. The psychologist's fear of the party ; Hard science and soft science ; Hard science - objective, soft science - subjective ; Can big science save soft science? ; Measuring mental activity ; How can the mental emerge from the physical? ; I can read your mind ; How the brain creates the world -- Clues from a damaged brain. Sensing the physical world ; The mind and the brain ; When the brain doesn't know ; When the brain knows, but doesn't tell ; When the brain tells lies ; How brain activity creates false knowledge ; How to make your brain lie to you ; Checking the reality of our experiences ; How do we know what's real? -- What a normal brain tells us about the world. Illusions of awareness ; Our secretive brain ; Our distorting brain ; Our creative brain -- What the brain tells us about our bodies. Privileged access? ; Where's the border? ; We don't know what we are doing ; Who's in control? ; My brain can act perfectly well without me ; Phantoms in the brain ; There's nothing wrong with me ; Who's doing it? ; Where is the "You"? -- Getting ahead by prediction. Patterns of reward and punishment ; How the brain embeds us in the world and then hides us ; The feeling of being in control ; When the system fails ; The invisible actor at the center of the world -- Our perception of the world is a fantasy that coincides with reality. Our brain creates an effortless perception of the physical world ; The information revolution ; What can clever machines really do? ; A problem with information theory ; The Reverend Thomas Bayes ; The ideal Bayesian observer ; How a Bayesian brain can make models of the world ; Is there a rhinoceros in the room? ; Where does prior knowledge come from? ; How action tells us about the world ; My perception is not of the world, but of my brain's model of the world ; Color is in the brain, not in the world ; Perception is a fantasy that coincides with reality ; We are not the slaves of our senses ; So how do we know what's real? ; Imagination is extremely boring -- How brains model minds. Biological motion: the way living things move ; How movements can reveal intentions ; Imitation ; Imitation: perceiving the goals of others ; Humans and robots ; Empathy ; The experience of agency ; The problem with privileged access ; Illusions of agency ; Hallucinating other agents -- Sharing minds - how the brain creates culture. The problem with translation ; Meanings and goals ; Solving the inverse problem ; Prior knowledge and prejudice ; What will he do next? ; Other people are contagious ; Communication is more than just speaking ; Teaching is not just a demonstration to be imitated ; Closing the loop ; Fork handles: the two Ronnies close the loop (eventually) ; Fully closing the loop ; Knowledge can be shared ; Knowledge is power ; The truth -- Epilogue: Me and my brain. Chris Frith and I ; Searching for the will in the brain ; Where is the top in top-down control? ; The homunculus ; This book is not about consciousness ; Why are people so nice (as long as they are treated fairly?) ; Even an illusion has responsibilities -- The evidence -- llustrations and text credits -- Index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.