CONTENTS

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Introduction
  6. 1: The origin of thought
    How do babies think and communicate, and how can we understand them better?
  7. The genesis of concepts
  8. Atrophied and persistent synaesthesias
  9. The mirror between perception and action
  10. Piaget’s mistake!
  11. The executive system
  12. The secret in their eyes
  13. Development of attention
  14. The language instinct
  15. Mother tongue
  16. The children of Babel
  17. A conjecturing machine
  18. The good, the bad and the ugly
  19. He who robs a thief…
  20. The colour of a jersey, strawberry or chocolate
  21. Émile and Minerva’s owl
  22. I, me, mine and other permutations by George
  23. Transactions in the playground, or the origin of commerce and theft
  24. Jacques, innatism, genes, biology, culture and an image
  25. 2: The fuzzy borders of identity
    What defines our choices and allows us to trust other people and our own decisions?
  26. Churchill, Turing and his labyrinth
  27. Turing’s brain
  28. Turing in the supermarket
  29. The tell-tale heart
  30. The body in the casino and at the chessboard
  31. Rational deliberation or hunches?
  32. Sniffing out love
  33. Believing, knowing, trusting
  34. Confidence: flaws and signatures
  35. The nature of optimists
  36. Odysseus and the consortium we belong to
  37. Flaws in confidence
  38. Others’ gazes
  39. The inner battles that make us who we are
  40. The chemistry and culture of confidence
  41. The seeds of corruption
  42. The persistence of social trust
  43. To sum up…
  44. 3: The machine that constructs reality
    How does consciousness emerge in the brain and how are we governed by our unconscious?
  45. Lavoisier, the heat of consciousness
  46. Pyschology in the prehistory of neuroscience
  47. Freud working in the dark
  48. Free will gets up off the couch
  49. The interpreter of consciousness
  50. ‘Performiments’: freedom of expression
  51. The prelude to consciousness
  52. In short: the circle of consciousness
  53. The physiology of awareness
  54. Reading consciousness
  55. Observing the imagination
  56. Shades of consciousness
  57. Do babies have consciousness?
  58. 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?
  59. Altered states of consciousness
  60. Nocturnal elephants
  61. The uroboros plot
  62. Deciphering dreams
  63. Daydreams
  64. Lucid dreaming
  65. Voyages of consciousness
  66. The factory of beatitude
  67. The cannabic frontier
  68. Towards a positive pharmacology
  69. The consciousness of Mr X
  70. The lysergic repertoire
  71. Hoffman’s dream
  72. The past and the future of consciousness
  73. The future of consciousness: is there a limit to mind-reading?
  74. 5: The brain is constantly transforming
    What makes our brain more or less predisposed to change?
  75. Virtue, oblivion, learning, and memory
  76. The universals of human thought
  77. The illusion of discovery
  78. Learning through scaffolding
  79. Effort and talent
  80. Ways of learning
  81. The OK threshold
  82. The history of human virtue
  83. Fighting spirit and talent: Galton’s two errors
  84. The fluorescent carrot
  85. The geniuses of the future
  86. Memory palace
  87. The morphology of form
  88. A monster with slow processors
  89. Our inner cartographers
  90. Fluorescent triangles
  91. The parallel brain and the serial brain
  92. Learning: a bridge between two pathways in the brain
  93. The repertoire of functions: learning is compiling
  94. Automatizing reading
  95. The ecology of alphabets
  96. The morphology of the word
  97. The two brains of reading
  98. The temperature of the brain
  99. 6: Educated brains
    How can we use what we have learned about the brain and human thought to improve education?
  100. The sound of the letters
  101. Word-tied
  102. What we have to unlearn
  103. The framework of thought
  104. Parallelawhat?
  105. Gestures and words
  106. Good, bad, yes, no, OK
  107. The teaching instinct
  108. Spikes of culture
  109. Docendo discimus
  110. Epilogue
  111. Acknowledgements
  112. About the Author
  113. Appendix
  114. Bibliography
  115. Newsletters

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