PROLOGUE

What is this person thinking? Can we see from her eyes, or would it take longer to get to know her?

Are there principles of understanding others and ourselves, principles of how the mind works in our everyday lives, on which we can reflect?

What is going on in the mind of the person pictured above? Questions like this are central to psychology. We cannot look into someone’s eyes and see the soul. Instead, we wonder what kind of person this may be, imagine what she may be thinking and feeling.1 If we were to meet her, we might come to understand her more as we enter into conversation with her.

At the end of the twentieth century, Seiji Ogawa discovered the method of functional Magnetic Brain Imaging (fMRI), which enables activations in people’s brains to be monitored as they think, perceive, remember, experience emotions. It has been said that this method began a revolution comparable to that started by astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus when he proposed that the Earth revolves around the Sun.² On this view, the revolution is of enabling us to understand some of the brain’s bases of experience. In this book we will discuss findings made by brain imaging. But the aim is to go further: to suggest that the revolution is deeper, not just dependent on a new method.

A revolution is taking place in our understanding how the mind works to know the physical and social world. We are beginning now to understand some principles of the mind, not just to know which parts of the brain are active when we do this, or feel that, not just to know how behavior is affected by events, by social processes such as conversation, and by learning, but to reach inner understandings of the minds of others and ourselves.

You may have seen advertisements for ways to improve your memory or powers of thought. Such methods depend on exercises and practice; they are like working out in a gym. Practice is important, and we come to it in chapter 19. But are there principles that enable us to think more deeply about human psychology? The answer is that some principles of this kind have been discovered, though others are only now being glimpsed. Each chapter of Our Minds, Our Selves concerns at least one significant principle in our understanding of who we are: not categorical statements, but to reflect upon.