Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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]

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.

For whatever reason, I had a hard time in trying to understand exactly what the main thesis of the book is. What exactly does the book's subtitle 'How the Brain Creates Our Mental World' mean? Is it about the physical/neurological mechanics of how the brain works? Is it about what conciousness is? Is it about psychology?

I think I understand it now. The theme of the book is rather simple - everything that you are aware of (the physical world, other people's minds and your own body), are actually models created by the brain.

And how does the brain creates these models? Using various ways such Baysian mechanics, predictions-feedback and associative learning.

The writing style is quite enlightening - full of humour and littered with antedotes, facts and interesting experiments. The use of the English Professor is simply brilliant and engaging. The numerous footnotes can be rather disruptive to the flow of reading at times.

I wish the book could do more with the 'serious' side of science - such as properly define the terminologies (i.e. mind, awareness, brains), or add a chapter on the latest and greatest scientific/philosophical advances to keep readers wanting to find out more about the brain/conciousness after this book.

Overall, fine book to keep if you are interested in neuroscience and psychology.

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 nigh impossible to convey to the reader through written words alone.

Another thing that stood out was the abundance of footnotes laced throughout the book. While many of them provide superfluous yet relevant information, others are either random factoids or interjections exhibiting the writer's wit. I personally see this as a double-edged sword. I find Frist's humor both enjoyable and refreshing and made this book even more enjoyable than it already is; however, the footnotes interrupt the flow of reading the book and I found myself mildly frustrated a few times when I discovered a footnote bore no worthwhile information pertaining to what it claimed to annotate.

One final thing that I found unique was the introduction of the Professor of English, a friend of the narrator. The Professor of English was a recurring character that Frith used as a vehicle to deliver a philosophical (or at least an unscientific) viewpoint to challenge Frith's inferences on perception. While extremely effective, I also find it funny how Frith, having a background in psychology (and thus being at the lower end of the scientific food chain), was so quick to introduce a caricature he obviously didn't take 100% seriously.

Materialistic opinion of book

Frith cites his sources for every claim I've seen him make in this book. For some of his examples, particularly the ones involving optical illusions, they aren't necessary; however, they are necessary for some of the other claims he makes--particularly those that don't come off as intuitive to the reader. For example, Frith made a claim about how infants perceive actions as goal-oriented and not movement-oriented and cites a study by Bekkering, H. et al. where an experimenter told infants to imitate their actions. So I can't help but agree with the claims he's made throughout the book because of the rigorous annotations he's made.

Having said this, there is one thing where Frith's inferences aren't as airtight as I would like. One thing I noticed was his claim that fMRI imaging made perception objective because the same areas of the brain show activity between different people with certain stimuli. I don't think this is a failsafe way to infer that one person is thinking what another person is thinking because the functional topology of the cortex is ever-changing. Indeed, in talking about phantom limb syndrome, Frith speaks about the `remapping' of the cerebral cortex following the amputation of a limb, and that functional remapping is a normal process. Since the topological areas of the cortex aren't strictly defined, there is a small yet real chance that the activation of the same brain area in two individuals may lead to two very different sensations. However, the foremost expert in phantom limb syndrome (V.A. Ramachandran) did give this book a positive review, calling it "a fascinating guided tour through the elusive interface between mind and brain written by a pioneer in the field." I guess if he's okay with it, I'm okay with it.

Final thoughts

Frith's book talks about a very complicated topic--human perception--and delivers it in a very concise and accessible manner. As a biomedical engineer-in-training with a heavy concentration in neuroscience, I found this book somewhat light when it came to describing the neural mechanisms of perception; however, I also believe that any further elaboration on the matters may alienate a reader who didn't have my background. Even so, I feel I learned a lot about how humans (and animals) perceive the world and how our brains fill in the blanks that our sensory periphery leaves out. Thus, I feel that anyone, be it someone who has a college-level understanding of neuroscience or a layperson who wants to learn more about human perception, would be able to learn a lot about themselves and their surrounding world.

I have read several books on brain function. This book has little new information, but presents the author's ideas in an easy to understand fashion which would be very helpful to new readers in this area, and might help consolidate old ideas more precisely for those familiar with the subject. An easy read, worth the effort.

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.

"Making up the Mind: How the Brain creates our mental world" is an entertaining book for general enthusiasts of neuroscience/ psychology. The spatial and temporal progression of topics reveals a meticulous topographic organization of the central premise as the author leads the reader through vacillating themes that intentionally are comprehensively contradictory. The narrative is quite enrapturing as the book progresses through a fictional discourse between the author, a Professor of English and the Microbiologists at a party. The information presented however is neither novel nor captivating to anyone with a basic understanding of the nervous system and general psychology. The book is expressively written for the neuroscience illiterate which often leaves anyone with a basic understanding of biology twiddling their thumbs in abject frustration at the lack of detail on a neuronal level.

The narrative journey starts with the author using the prejudice that he suffers for being a psychologist (during his fictional discourse with the other two main characters of the book) to dispel the common misconceptions associated with the field. He brings to light the recent breakthroughs in the field of cognitive neuroscience that make it by far one of the most coveted research fields in recent times. This epilogue gives way to the author main theme that the mind and the brain are significantly out of sync which according to the author creates the illusion of sensation, free will and control. This section is riddled with experimental evidence which suggests that sensations and decisions are often integrated in the cerebral cortex even prior to our knowledge of such an occurrence. With numerous examples that validate such a claim, the author leaves the reader with the impression that everything that we are cognitively aware of is nothing but an elaborate illusion. Thus any sane reader will begin to doubt their sanity by the end of this section of the book based on the implications of the claims espoused. In a perfect representation of the contradictory comprehensiveness, the following section in the book went on to cover how we can indeed trust our senses within a certain margin of error. Finally the author wraps ups with a serious look at how perception, biomechanics and the simplest of complex movement works through the use of mental models which are iteratively improved on using the negative feedback (error signals) provided by the senses. The conclusion covers the phenomenal ability of humans to extend these mental models beyond biomechanics to even extrapolate the cognitive undergirding of other minds (i.e. communication).

The author employs the Socratic method of explanation guided by questioning but does so in an ingenious form of a fictional conversation at a party. During the course of the fictional discourse with a non science professor, the author encounters and responds to the typical questions that are posed by individuals new to the field of neuroscience thereby advancing through the book with each question posed. Even the topical organization of the book within each part is done through the use of questions. The tone and general dissemination of information espoused is in a conversational tone thereby making the book and overall easy read.

The author's tirade during the initial section of the book states that we are not cognitively aware of the computational function of the brain which in turn gives us an underrepresented illusion of reality is truly flawed not from a scientific perspective but rather from an evolutionary behavioral standpoint. Considering the complex biomechanical calculations involved with even the simplest of movements, each of us must be truly enthralled at the fact that we are not aware of the constant recalculation and regeneration of movement. As a biomedical engineer one of my areas of study is biomechanics which requires the modeling and predictive inference of movement. A biomechanics problem often can take hours on end to solve because of the inherent complexity involved with deformational bodies and general dynamics of motion. If we were cognitively aware of the constant mathematical correction of every movement that is required, it would by and large incapacitate our ability to function as sociable human beings. A facsimile would be two people trying to have a normal sane conversation at a rock concert. The background noise would hinder if not severely inhibit any sensible communication. From that perspective alone, unlike the dismal tone that the author takes on the matter, I am indeed thrilled at not being aware of the complex calculus that underlies even our simplest of motions. During the second part of the book, the author goes on to present how even that which we are cognitively aware is flawed due to a Bayesian inference of posteriors that is conducted when we encounter any scenario. The author would thus best agree with Sherlock Holmes who once famously said, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth". Besides being thrilled at the elevation of a famous statistical method well known to engineers, the fact remains that our natural ability to infer using predictive probability remains one of the our greatest assets in discerning reality. While it is true that the system can be fooled through the use of unconventional representation of non realistic stimuli, the odds of encountering such stimuli in the larger world is infinitesimally small if not nonexistent. Thus in other words the exploration of such an area of research has little real world day to day implications when compared to the much genuinely interesting research that is conducted in field of neuroscience. By far and large, the most enjoyable part of the book (which stems from bias as an engineer) is the modeling section covered during the final section. The author statement on page 135 that "Our brains build models of the world and continuously modify these models on the basis of signals that reach our senses" is when two previous premises are integrated to provide a holistic representation of how Bayesian inference comes into play with both sensory input and the theoretical construct of cognitive expectancy. Simply stated, it is in that one line that the author expresses what would interest any scientist the most. Consider for example the irony in the fact that scientists and engineers often try to model the brain when the brain's representation of expectation and reality is in and of itself a model.

On the whole the book is well written thereby making it an enjoyable read. The lack of functional neuronal mechanistic details is quite glaring but considering that the book is written as an introduction to the field, the flaw is understandable and thus expected. It should be noted though that the narration does have a significant psychology bias which is not representative of neural engineers that also do form a significant portion of the neuroscience community. If you are new to the field of neuroscience/ psychology, then by all means this book is a must read. It has all the interesting facts without any of the gory underlying details. The style of writing is quite unconventional and thus is on the whole quite an enjoyable read as the author uses empirical evidence of remarkable experiments to support and summarize the current views in the neuroscience community.

I have been reading material on brain processes by neural scientists (Ramachandran, Damasio, etal.) and computer scientists (Hawkins) and Frith complements and supplements the perspectives of these other authors. This book retained my interest from Frith's candid beginning admission that psychology is a soft, subjective science to his ending discussion of altruism and freewill. The author knows the biases inherent in his own mental view of the mind but nevertheless manages to present a consistent story of how unconscious processes may work based on experimental evidence. The breadth of Frith's coverage is also admirable. He discusses the nonlinear construction of the Parthenon (a visual illusion), rehashes Libet's classic free will experiment, Bayesian conditional probability theory as a possible neural process, Shannon's information theory, and the importance of prediction (backward feedback processes to enhance forward paths). All in all this is a book worth reading.