Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World

by Chris Frith and Christopher D. Frith

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1405136944
• ISBN13: 9781405136945
• Release Date: May 2007
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.9" x 9.8"

Customer Reviews

Brilliant introduction

Frith has a gift at introducing difficult material and making it highly accessible. His writing is playful and efficient. In a very short amount of text, Frith gets it done. Read the other reviews for more detail. I just want to add that the first section is short and unconvincing. Keep reading. The second section is the gem. The third section is short, tantalizing, and reads like an introduction; it needs to be fleshed out into a book of its own. Finally, the design of "The Evidence" chapter (the references) is brilliant - we don't get bogged down on citations in the text but are swiftly guided to the primary literature here.

Reality and human perception from an interdisciplinary perspective

Introduction "Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates our Mental World" by Chris Frith, in a nutshell, explores the mechanisms by which the brain perceives the outside world and what its implications are. This review seeks to provide a synopsis of the book--hopefully without spoilers--as well as my personal opinion about the book. All in all, I believe it was a well-written book that made a good attempt at addressing perception from not only a psychological perspective, but a biological and philosophical perspective as well. Relatively spoiler-free summary The book is divided into 5 sections: a prologue, three parts, and an epilogue. In the prologue, Frith talks about how neuroscience is interdisciplinary in that the knowledge inferred from it pertains to biology, chemistry, the social sciences, and even the liberal arts. However he also points out, there is an unspoken hierarchy within the sciences (as explained by Randall Munroe of xkcd: http://www.xkcd.com/435/), making a distinction between 'hard' sciences and 'soft' sciences. Historically, hard sciences such as physics and chemistry are objective and its results quantifiable, soft sciences are subjective, relying on personal accounts rather than quantifiable data. However, quantifiable data pertaining to human perception became possible with the advent of new medical imaging technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging. From here, he divulges into three main parts of the book. The first part of the book, titled 'Seeing through the Brain's Illusions,' talks about the different means by which the brain fills in missing parts from the body's relatively crude sensory information. The second part of the book, titled 'How the Brain Does It,' focuses more on internal factors that contribute to perception as well as evolutionary bases of why we perceive things the way we do. The third part of the book, titled 'Culture and the Brain,' talks about how these factors affect interpersonal communication and its impact on society and culture. Stylistic opinion of the book George W. Bush once said that "one of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures." When taken out of context, this quote pertains to this book rather well. It is hard enough to tell a person what they perceive, let alone do it in a book. Thus, most if not all of the figures he includes with the text illustrate his points and examples rather eloquently. The most common examples he uses are optical illusions. While they are rather overused, Frith puts them into context by giving them psychological bases explaining why they appear the way they do. Also, as every good scientist does, he cites experimental evidence conducted by others throughout his paper. Where Frith differs from other scientists is that he explains this evidence in detail and in such a way that it's comprehendible, often including figures to illustrate experimental setups--something that would've been ni

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

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.

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.