Here’s a problem. Write a short book—under fifty thousand words—titled The Mind. What do you include? This crux of this problem is that the mind is responsible for everything we experience, as well as lots of things we are unaware of that create our experience. It is about our perceptions, physical movements, reading and listening, thoughts, emotions, and interactions with others, among other things. So at the outset let’s establish that it is impossible to cover the mind in fifty thousand words, or, for that matter, even in multiple full-length volumes. Nonetheless, I thought I’d give it a try.
My starting point was a course I was teaching for the Osher Lifetime Learning Institute (OLLI) at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Arizona, and Carnegie-Mellon University titled “Your Amazing Mind.” My OLLI course begins with three questions: What is the mind? What is consciousness? and What happens in the mind that we are not conscious of? This discussion leads down many interesting byways (What is it like to be conscious? Are non-human animals conscious? Can we know what someone else is experiencing? Is it possible that making a decision involves an unconscious process?) and inevitably to the brain, which not only creates all of our experiences, but accomplishes that creation largely “behind the scenes,” outside of our awareness.
After covering these topics in chapters 1–3, and with about twenty-five thousand words to go, I faced a decision: how to go beyond this basic introductory material to cover specific cognitive capacities like perception, memory, language, and everything else the mind does? Because I did not have the space to devote a separate chapter to each of these capacities, I decided to focus on a principle that holds across cognitive capacities.
That principle is the principle of prediction—figuring out what is going to happen next—and in chapters 4 and 5 I consider eye movements, visual object perception, tactile sensations, language, music, memory, and social interactions. What unfolds over these two chapters is the idea that there is a process that operates across many different capacities. But as I tell this story, it also becomes apparent that this process actually comprises many different processes. Predicting where the eye is going to move next and predicting what a person is going to do next involve an automatic mechanistic process in the case of the eye, and a much more cognitive process in the case of the person. What this means is that prediction has a lot to teach us about the mind in general. In addition, we can discuss prediction at both the behavioral level (how does prediction operate as we read?) and the physiological level (how is neural firing affected by how predictable a sentence is?).
Finally, the last chapter. What should it be about? In early drafts, I outlined chapters on mind wandering, thinking, and social interaction, each of which are important behaviors. But in the end, I looked back at the chapters about prediction and asked myself, “What do all the behaviors and physiological processes associated with prediction have in common?” One answer is that they all include communication between different places in the brain. Because these connections are so central to prediction, and to most other cognitive processes as well, it seemed like a good choice for the final chapter. After all, the mind, which is created by the brain, emerges not from the firing of neurons in one specialized area but from communications that travel across what could be called “highways of the mind.”
Thus, although this book does not “cover the field,” it does provide an introduction to age-old questions about the mind while also describing current research, some of which is moving so quickly that ten years from now, we may be looking back on this research as “the beginning of something big.” So I invite you to engage in this book, which, although it is brief, will give you a taste of some of the exciting things we know and are finding out about the mind.