"Our research must be relevant, understandable, and, best of all, fun." (p. 102) says Chris Frith, Professor in Neuropsychology at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London in his new book "Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World". This claim he himself fulfills indeed: His book is of great interest, easy to access and fun to read.

Two questions unsettle Frith in this book: How does the brain create the world, and how does it create the mind? For that the brain is the only true agent, is the author's core conviction. It is the brain that perceives signals from the world and creates the illusion of a stringent, focused and centered outside world out of these; it is the brain that creates consciousness and lets us experience ourselves as free agents. From a philosophical point of view, I had difficulties with the resulting jargon putting the brain in the subject's position of the sentence, as in "our brain doesn't tell us everything it knows", "my brain can act perfectly well without me", "sometimes [our brain] actively misleads us", "Miss W's brain had incorrectly concluded that…", but Frith is aware of this problem and does not shy away from discussing it in the epilogue, and what he has to say about the brain's actions is interesting enough to follow his argument willingly.

With a vast range of examples from scientific studies, case histories of people with brain-damage, literary quotes (from Edgar Allen Poe, Ian McEwan, etc.), and even pieces of art (Stanley Kubrick's films, Malevich's pictures, etc.), the author develops a consistent picture of how the brain creates our impression of being minded people embedded in a physical world. First, he tries to compare what the brain tells me about the world to what the brain itself knows or doesn't know. Sometimes, he explains, the brain knows things it doesn't tell us (e.g. in blindsight), sometimes it even tells lies. Our access to the physical world is never as direct as it seems to us, but is mediated by an active and creative brain. The key idea is that the brain constantly develops models of the world and uses these models to predict what will happen next. This form of mild prejudice enables the brain to recognize at which points further adaptive work has to be done without working too much in vane. The brain, says Frith, is a labor saving device working along the lines of Bayesian statistics.

By hiding from us the many unconscious inferences the brain makes, it creates two illusions that are central to our feeling of being-in-the-world: First, the illusion we had direct contact with objects in the physical world, and second, the illusion our own mental world was isolated and private. But in fact, the author shows, the distinction between the mental and the physical is by far not as fundamental as we think. While the bad news about this is that the world's appearance is not reliable, there is good news, too: as a consequence of his argument, to Chris Frith other minds are not as far away as it seemed, especially to a long philosophical tradition. Our brain enables us to enter the world of other minds, to share feelings, to guess right other people's intentions, to mirror actions. Frith wants to know how our brain is able to do this.

In short, his argument for the possibility of true access to other minds goes as follows: When we act as agents ourselves, certain internal signals are suppressed … that enables us to feel embedded in the physical environment. For example, when typing fast on my computer keyboard, I don't realize how the keys feel on my fingertips, or which small finger-movement I have to plan and exercise next. The way in which we perceive others as being agents … imagining their intentions and mirroring their feelings … is after all the same way in which we perceive ourselves as being agents. The privacy of our own bodily feelings is not present in those moments in which we primarily act upon the world. "It is precisely because we don't have any direct connections with the physical world, even the world of our own bodies, that we are able to enter the mental world of others." (p. 156)

This is a strong and interesting claim for philosophers as well as for psychologists or neuroscientists. The following discussion of how the brain solves the problem of communication, how knowledge can be shared and how translation is ever possible, seems a bit weaker to me in terms of philosophical consistency, but is still full of fresh ideas as well as reliable references.

Making up the Mind is an interesting book to everybody who wants to learn more about how the brain gives rise to our mental experiences. Engaging in Frith's argument may need some time and some energy from the reader, but it is a job that pays off well. Plus, Frith does whatever he can to help the reader: he gives a neuroanatomical introduction, explains techniques of brain imaging, he explains his technical terms and includes a nice index at the end, and he reveals his scientific sources in a large bibliography.

It lies in the nature of the problems tackled that a range of open question remains, for example the relation between a working model and a true model of the world; or the question if the brain can be described as an agent, or who then is "me" if I say "I am a product of my brain".

Rather than answering every and any question in this field, Frith developes an interesting account of how the brain creates the mental world with enjoyable side trips to Bayesian statistics, optical illusions, information theory, artificial intelligence, the Libet experiment and the question of free will, learning theories, etc.

As Frith himself depicts in a sort of framing story, you will easily find yourself talking about these ideas at your next dinner party, as well as use it for serious considerations on the brain or as a toolbox for next term's essay. A stimulating new book by a distinguished scientist who knows what he is talking about.

© 2007 Miriam Gabriel

Miriam Gabriel earned a Master's degree in philosophy in Berlin, Germany. She is preparing a PhD thesis on Embodied Intersubjectivity.

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Categories: Psychology