Most of my books have been rather solitary endeavors, but in this case I have benefited enormously from conversations and comments from a number of extremely knowledgeable, brilliant, talented people. First and foremost, I would like to thank Andrew Potter, to whom this book is dedicated. Most of the argument of this book was worked out with Andrew, and it was initially planned as a co-authored work, a follow-up to The Rebel Sell, which we wrote together in 2004. When we first started working on this book, Andrew was living in Toronto, with a somewhat boring job that left him plenty of free time to write. Shortly after we worked out the argument, and even sketched out the table of contents and the first draft of an introduction, he was offered what I like to think of as a “grown-up job” as managing editor of the Ottawa Citizen. He moved to Ottawa, and hasn’t had more than fifteen minutes to collect his thoughts since (much less write a book). So I wound up writing it up myself. I nevertheless owe an enormous debt to Andrew for his contributions—beyond just working out the ideas, some of it was written by him (material drawn from a magazine article we co-wrote, “Retrouver la Raison,” Nouveau Projet, 1 [2012]).
I have also benefited enormously from conversations over the years with David R. Olson, and even more from his detailed comments on the manuscript. Psychology is not my field, and so the opportunity to converse with an expert, especially one as eminent in his field as David, was absolutely invaluable. Most importantly, he took pains to impress upon me that not every study is credible and not everything that gets published in a psychology journal is true. If I manage to come across as less than entirely credulous, David deserves much of the credit. Nevertheless, as is inevitable in a work such as this, I simplify a number of very complex issues. I am aware of this, and would just like to emphasize that this is despite David’s efforts, not due to them.
I would also like to thank Joel Anderson for introducing me to the “extended mind” hypothesis and convincing me of its importance, as well as working with me on a number of academic projects, including a co-authored paper, “Procrastination and the Extended Will” (published in Mark White and Chrisoula Andreou, eds., The Thief of Time [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010]). The importance of kluges is something that Joel impressed upon me, particularly through his paper “Neuroprosthetics, the Extended Mind, and Respect for Persons with Disability,” in Marcus Düwell, Christoph Rehmann-Sutter, and Dietmar Mieth, eds., The Contingent Nature of Life: Bioethics and Limits of Human Existence (Heidelberg: Springer, 2008). He has also used the manuscript of this book twice in his courses, and so he has served not only as an able critic, but as a conduit for the comments of his students at the University of Utrecht.
As far as the manuscript is concerned, I have benefited from comments and discussion with Idil Boran, Dominic Martin, Terrence Heath, June Clark, Jennifer Petrela, Andreas Petrela Paiement, Simone Chambers, Jocelyn Maclure, and Russell Hoy. I have also benefited enormously from conversations over the years with Ronald de Sousa, Kyle Menken, and Benoit Hardy-Vallée. For research support I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. And finally, I would like to thank my editor at HarperCollins, Jim Gifford, as well as Doug Richmond, for putting in a larger-than-usual amount of work editing the book. The first drafts of it were pretty rough; to the extent that it hangs together better now, it is largely due to their efforts. Noelle Zitzer and Stephanie Fysh also provided invaluable assistance in the preparation of the final manuscript, and special thanks are owed to Priscilla Tang for compiling the index.