Phenomenal! Absolutely phenomenal!!

books:


	• Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World Chris Frith Wiley-Blackwell, 2007 - 248 pages average customer review:based on 4 reviews view larger image
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Who's in charge?

It's hard to resolve where the best place to encounter Chris Frith might be - a classroom, a pub, or a party. In this book, the last is set as a means of providing exchanges between a working cognitive neuroscientist and people from the humanities and other sciences - English and physics, in this case. Frith goes to some effort to show how many misconceptions about how the mind works still exist in our society. He wants to set those right, and does so splendidly in this book on the workings of the brain. With a style one might almost describe as jocular, Frith reveals how the brain deals with the world outside and within us.

Frith had the good fortune to enter the field as the new, non-intrusive methods of brain imaging were emerging. Big, cumbersome and expensive, these tools, the PET, fMRI and CAT scanning devices soon came into more widespread use. These machines could map the living brain, while patients could be queried or given tests to assist in determining which brain areas were active at a given time. Frith describes these tools as moving brain studies from a "soft" science to a "hard" science in which detailed measurements could be made. Previously, it was either guess-work, or brains could be analysed only after a patient's death.

What has emerged from these studies is a very serious challenge to what we call "reality" and our perception of it. The brain does many things without our realising it. Apart from the obvious ones like keeping the heart and lungs pumping, there is the issue of what we "see". We like to think that when we "look" at something or somebody, we are seeing a continuous image. That's simply not the case. Beyond the fact that the eye undergoes a rapid shifting motion called "saccading", it's also converting photons into electrical signals. The brain must interpret the incoming messages and make sense of them. When it finally sends a message to the frontal cortex, an "image" has been recorded and you are now in a position to react to it.

The many vagaries in the operation of the brain in creating the mind, lead many in the humanities to scorn cognitive neuroscience. Frith uses his English professor as a foil to challenge the value of his work. "You can't pin down the mind like a specimen in a display case", he has her intone. But Frith's work and that of the many researchers he cites, demonstrates the fallacy of believing that we are in control of our minds.

Vision is but one area where the brain must interpret input and build a result for you to understand. The brain has developed a number of tricks to help itself produce something meaningful from what the senses tell it. The chief resource in this mental technique is memory. From our earliest years, the brain has been recording and cataloguing various inputs to assist in the formation of what we think we perceive. A point that must be remembered through all this is that the catalog isn't something that the devices can pinpoint for us to analyse. Memory, though it has fairly well-defined pathways, is part of a very dynamic and elusive system. What it produces for our conscious use is highly arbitrary. The brain may serve up memory images almost as a whim. Very little of it is under our control, yet we continue to assert we are given "free will". Frith doesn't deny there's an element of will in how we think, but it's anything but "will" in an absolute sense. And we must be cautious about how free of constraints it is. Since the brain is faced with countless episodes of false information, such as optical illusions, those memories we depend upon as the foundation for decisions, "free will" comes close to being meaningless.

For the person new to the ideas and research being done in how the brain works, this book is the ideal starting point. It's invaluable for the concepts it introduces and explains - so far as is known, and does so in a compelling manner. While he chides the English teacher on the one hand, he pays attention to her comments as a lever for introducing a topic needing further explanation. And his explanations, while challenging some long-held philosophical notions, demonstrate how much we've learned, yet still need to know about the brain. A fine gift for a student seeking a career path. What we learn about the brain tells us a great deal about who we are. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

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Smashing

Every once in a while, I read a book which performs a sort of miraculous feat. It sets out to do the seemingly impossible, and then not only does so, but does so in a way which seems almost effortless.

Chris Frith's book "The Making Up The Mind" is like this. Its task is nothing less than to explain "how the brain creates our mental world" to a popular but educated audience - and in the space of 193 pages, he actually does it. Along the way, he references dozens of the most important studies on conscious/unconscious perception, computation, self-image construction, etc., extracting from them their most relevant points, and weaves them into an engaging narrative characterized as much by its clarity as by its genial tone.

A few particular personal high points in this book: Frith's tidy explanation of Bayesianism, his remarks on the inevitability of pre-judging, the brain as a cultural organ, and most of all, his chapter on prediction/evaluation mechanisms.

When I started the book, I kept a pencil handy so as to underline all the most important sentences/concepts. By the time I was done reading it, my book looked like a band of hypergraphic monkeys had gotten hold of it, so full of circles and lines and scribbled notes was it.

Verdict: five big stars.

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Phenomenal! Absolutely phenomenal!!

When I first found this book, it took some convincing before I bought it. The book is fairly expensive, and from looking at the chapter sections, the book seems to promise to explain the impossible... and in a very short space.

However, there was one other review, which was very positive. I then learned that the book had been positively reviewed by both V.S. Ramachandran and Oliver Sacks. So I bought it, and I sure am glad I did!

To put it bluntly, this is by far the best book on the brain that I have ever read. Don't get me wrong, I love the books by Sacks, Ramachandran, Pinker, etc and recommend them to people all of the time. But as for overall readability, wittiness (I laughed out loud numerous times), and extremely clear explanations of complicated topics, this book is tops. There were a few things in the book I already knew about, but Firth explained them again in new ways I hadn't considered. I was constantly blown away the awesome amount of information in each chapter.

The book does exactly as the title promises, and explains from basically the ground up, what different parts of the brain do, how they do it, why they do it, and how we know... and how this all comes together to make the mental world that we experience. He addresses all of the common questions and objections that arise during discussing such topics, and even addresses why many scientists give psychologists such a hard time about being "soft scientists", and why this is changing.

So in conclusion, if you know nothing about the brain, or even if you know a lot about the brain, read this book. I am sure that everyone will learn a TON from it, and enjoy it immensely. I guarantee that you wont regret it.

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An enlightening read

When I read through the prologue of this book, I thought it would be about consciousness, and how activity in the brain explains why we have the experiences that we do.

I was wrong. This book is not about consciousness. Instead, Chris Frith attempts to explain how our mental world arises from activity in our brain. He does this not from wild speculation, but from a horde of neuroscientific evidence. He stops short of explaining why our experience of our mental world is at it is. For example, Frith shows that colour is all in your mind, but he does not explain why the colour red appears to you as it does.

The book is divided into three parts. In part 1, Frith shows, using strong scientific evidence, that our experience of direct, complete and immediate access to the physical world (through our senses) is nothing but an illusion created by the brain. There is a real world out there, but we don't experience the real world - we experience our brain's coarse model of the real world.

In part 2, Frith explains how our brain develops good and useful models of the world. Roughly, this is done by making predictions based on an existing model (prior knowledge/assumptions) about the world, examining evidence about the errors in these predictions, and updating the model in light of these errors. This iterative process is the essence of learning. All this work is done subconsciously, of course - we just experience our brain's ever-changing model of reality. At the end of this part of the book (chapter 6), Frith explains that it is by modelling the physical world that we can model the minds of others, and that our access to the mental world is as indirect as our access to the physical world.

In part 3, Frith explains that our brains develop good models of other people's minds using the same scientific process (described in the previous paragraph) by which our brains develop good models of the physical world. This process allows us to (sort-of) understand other people, and to share ideas with them.

In the epilogue, rather than try to explain consciousness, Frith offers speculation on what consciousness - and the associated illusion that we are free agents - is for. He argues it gives us reason to reward and punish, thus it facilitates cooperation. I personally feel this is the weakest part of the book (or perhaps I just missed the point), but it provides interesting food for thought.

Overall, the book is well structured and an easy read for the intelligent layman. Frith writes with a very casual and informal style and a good dose of humour. There are a lot of typos that will stop you in your tracks, but the intended meaning is always clear from the context.

The book is perhaps a little brief, but I am satisfied with what I've learnt. Since reading the book a few days ago, I've actually noticed that I "see" things differently now. Like when Neo can "see the matrix" at the end of the film The Matrix, I feel like I can (to some degree) see through some of the illusions created by my brain as I go about my life. This is an empowering change - the world seems more interesting, and less threatening. I did not expect this to happen from simply reading a popular science book.

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Written by one of the world's leading neuroscientists, Making Up the Mind is the first accessible account of experimental studies showing how the brain creates our mental world.

* Uses evidence from brain imaging, psychological experiments and studies of patients to explore the relationship between the mind and the brain

* Demonstrates that our knowledge of both the mental and physical comes to us through models created by our brain

* Shows how the brain makes communication of ideas from one mind to another possible

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