The secret life of the mind : how your brain thinks, feels, and decides

The secret life of the mind How your brain thinks, feels, and decides

Mariano Sigman, 1972-

Book - 2017

A leading neuroscientist draws on physics, linguistics, psychology, education, and other disciplines to explain the inner workings of the human brain and explore the role of neuroscience in daily life.

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Subjects
Brain.
Neurosciences.
Published
New York, NY : Little, Brown and Company 2017.
Language
English
Spanish
Main Author
Mariano Sigman, 1972- (author)
Edition
First North American edition
Item Description
"Originally published in Buenos Aires and Barcelona by Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, S.A. in 2015"--Title page verso.
Physical Description
277 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 247-263) and index.
ISBN
9780316549622
  • Introduction
  • 1. The origin of thought: How do babies think and communicate, and how can we understand them better?
  • 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: What defines our choices and allows us to trust other people and our own decisions?
  • 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: How does consciousness emerge in the brain and how are we governed by our unconscious?
  • 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): What happens in the brain as we dream; is it possible for us to decipher, control and manipulate our dreams?
  • 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: What makes our brain more or less predisposed to change?
  • 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: How can we use what we have learned about the brain and human thought to improve education?
  • 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
  • Bibliography
  • Acknowledgements
  • Index
Review by New York Times Review

Sigman's book is as much about the workings of the brain as it is about the mind. His idiosyncratic tour - "a summary of neuroscience from the perspective of my own experience" - starts with the mind of the child, then moves to the brain circuits involved in decision making and alights on consciousness, before ending with learning and formal education. One interesting section describes what researchers can now do with brain imaging technology to make better guesses about what pictures people are watching, memories they are recalling, or even what dreams they are having. This is not just a neuroscientist's parlor trick: It's an essential way of figuring out the codes the brain uses to represent information and knowledge. Sigman is one of many professors to become popularizers of their own fields, rather than leave the explanation and interpretation to science writers. His book is peppered with brief stories and artistic allusions, and it moves quickly from idea to idea, study to study. But I found myself wishing he more deeply described the experiments he mentions and some of the nuances about their proper interpretation. Readers of science books are interested in the concrete details of how it all gets done as well as what it really means.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 24, 2017]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Hidden, behind-the-scenes mechanics of thought are revealed in this scintillating ramble through brain science. Cognitive neuroscientist Sigman expands his celebrated TED talk to show the unexpected inner workings of a raft of mental phenomena: the sophisticated innate theories of mind and moral philosophy that infants use to parse social life and the complex statistical analyses they deploy to learn language; the subconscious calculations that underlie hunches, which turn out to be surprisingly accurate and which determine our decisions many seconds before we are consciously aware of them; the active mental lives of patients in a "vegetative state"; the genetic endowment of champion athletes, seen less in physical talent than in mental determination and "fighting spirit"; astronomer Carl Sagan's marijuana epiphanies; and the author's own mysterious ability to control the temperature of his fingertips. Calling on authors from Plato to Freud and on a trove of cute experiments on brainy babies, some of his own devising, Sigman's lucid exposition probes and unsettles our intuitions about how we think in the light of new science that makes the machinery transparent. The loosely organized text meanders at times, but readers will find it a fascinating browse packed with arresting insights at every turn. Agent: Max Brockman, Brockman Inc. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Physicist and neuroscientist Sigman (founder, Integrative Neuroscience Laboratory, Univ. of Buenos Aires, Argentina) here builds on his popular TED Talk "Your Words May Predict Your Future Mental Health." His goal is to help readers understand themselves more deeply. Ideas, dreams, emotions from childhood, consciousness, and learning are major themes in this guide to self-knowledge. The human brain has changed little in 60,000 years. At six months infants theorize and form abstract concepts, making discoveries through play and logic, similar to scientific method. They can infer intentions, desires, kindness and wrongdoing. Two year olds comprehend ownership, and with this text, adults can appreciate their thinking and judgment. Currently, most children engage with more than one language-a mental boon for attention, cognitive development, and social inclusion. Sigman's text alludes to ideas from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile and celebrates the work of cognitive psychologist Jacques Mehler. VERDICT Accessible, enjoyable, and enriching, this work is a boon to lay readers, students, and scientists.-E. James Lieberman, George -Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

An exploration of recent discoveries in neuroscience and the ways in which we perceive and interpret the world.The good news is that good news is received and processed in one part of the brain. The bad news is that bad news is received and processed in another region. Why? Sigman, the founder of the Integrative Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Buenos Aires and director of the Human Brain Project, ventures explanations for this apparent mystery, but more, he enfolds a few lessons on the controversial thesis that optimists and pessimists have different kinds of brains, much as conservatives and liberals are said to be wired differently. The author is an experimentalist with training in physics, supporting these softer interpretations with hard-edged results. One of the most on-point parts of the book is Sigman's discussion of the application of neuroscience to general education. Dyslexia, by the author's account, is more a phonological than a visual problem, leading him to declare, "you cannot read without being able to pronounce," and adding, "the phonological awareness system can be stimulated before reading begins," preparing children for reading with word games and other activities. In the larger sphere, learning a second language in very early childhood helps shatter prejudices, for even then, children discern accents and tend to trust those who sound more like them than linguistic outsiders do. The takeaway is that "revealing and understanding these predispositions can be a tool for changing them." The idea that through its relative plasticity the child brain can be molded for the better is not new, but Sigman's pointed examples of rational (and not so rational) decision-making, consciousness, mental states, and learning ("culture travels like a highly contagious virus") are backed by the latest research. There have been many recent books on the workings of the mind, and while this one doesn't quite stand out with the best of the pack, it rewards readers with many useful insights. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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