Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1 The origin of thought: How do babies think and communicate, and how can we understand them better? 5
The genesis of concepts 6
Atrophied and persistent synaesthesias 8
The mirror between perception and action 11
Piaget's mistake! 13
The executive system 15
The secret in their eyes 16
Development of attention 18
The language instinct 20
Mother tongue 22
The children of Babel 25
A conjecturing machine 28
The good, the bad and the ugly 31
He who robs a thief … 33
The colour of a jersey, strawberry or chocolate 34
Émile and Minerva's owl 38
I, me, mine and other permutations by George 40
Transactions in the playground, or the origin of commerce and theft 41
Jacques, innatism, genes, biology, culture and an image 44
2 The fuzzy borders of identity: What defines our choices and allows us to trust other people and our own decisions? 47
Churchill, Turing and his labyrinth 48
Turing's brain 49
Turing in the supermarket 53
The tell-tale heart 55
The body in the casino and at the chessboard 57
Rational deliberation or hunches? 59
Sniffing out love 60
Believing, knowing, trusting 63
Confidence: flaws and signatures 64
The nature of optimists 65
Odysseus and the consortium we belong to 69
Flaws in confidence 72
Others' gazes 75
The inner battles that make us who we are 78
The chemistry and culture of confidence 85
The seeds of corruption 91
The persistence of social trust 95
To sum up … 97
3 The machine that constructs reality: How does consciousness emerge in the brain and how are we governed by our unconscious? 99
Lavoisier, the heat of consciousness 99
Pyschology in the prehistory of neuroscience 100
Freud working in the dark 102
Free will gets up off the couch 104
The interpreter of consciousness 108
'Performiments': freedom of expression 109
The prelude to consciousness 112
In short: the circle of consciousness 115
The physiology of awareness 117
Reading consciousness 120
Observing the imagination 121
Shades of consciousness 123
Do babies have consciousness? 126
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? 129
Altered states of consciousness 129
Nocturnal elephants 131
The uroboros plot 134
Deciphering dreams 137
Daydreams 138
Lucid dreaming 141
Voyages of consciousness 143
The factory of beatitude 143
The cannabic frontier 147
Towards a positive pharmacology 149
The consciousness of Mr X 150
The lysergic repertoire 153
Hoffman's dream 155
The past and the future of consciousness 159
The future of consciousness: is there a limit to mind-reading? 165
5 The brain is constantly transforming: What makes our brain more or less predisposed to change? 169
Virtue, oblivion, learning, and memory 169
The universals of human thought 170
The illusion of discovery 173
Learning through scaffolding 175
Effort and talent 177
Ways of learning 178
The OK threshold 179
The history of human virtue 180
Fighting spirit and talent: Galton's two errors 181
The fluorescent carrot 185
The geniuses of the future 187
Memory palace 190
The morphology of form 193
A monster with slow processors 194
Our inner cartographers 197
Fluorescent triangles 198
The parallel brain and the serial brain 199
Learning: a bridge between two pathways in the brain 200
The repertoire of functions: learning is compiling 200
Automatizing reading 202
The ecology of alphabets 203
The morphology of the word 204
The two brains of reading 206
The temperature of the brain 206
6 Educated brains: How can we use what we have learned about the brain and human thought to improve education? 211
The sound of the letters 212
Word-tied 214
What we have to unlearn 217
The framework of thought 219
Parallelawhat? 222
Gestures and words 224
Good, bad, yes, no, OK 227
The teaching instinct 228
Spikes of culture 236
Docendo discimus 238
Epilogue 243
Appendix 245
Bibliography 247
Acknowledgements 264
Index 267
