I am grateful to my fiancée, Heather Bortfeld, for many thousands of hours of illuminating discussion and true companionship.
I thank everyone at the Wylie Agency, especially Sarah Chalfant and Rebecca Nagel, for helping me to externalize by letting me hand thousands of details over to them. Dawna Coleman and Karle-Philip Zamor of my laboratory at McGill, gracefully took care of thousands of other details, in many cases without my even knowing about them, and were instrumental in the completion of the book. Stephen Morrow, Stephanie Hitchcock, LeeAnn Pemberton, Daniel Lagin, Christine Ball, Amanda Walker, Diane Turbide, and Erin Kelly from Penguin were all incredibly helpful in bringing the manuscript to life.
For commenting on drafts, providing advice, and answering questions, I’m indebted to Mark Baldwin, Perry Cook, Jim Ferguson, Michael Gazzaniga, Lee Gerstein, Dan Gilbert, Lew Goldberg, Scott Grafton, Diane Halpern, Martin Hilbert, Daniel Kahneman, Jeffrey Kimball, Stephen Kosslyn, Lloyd Levitin, Shari Levitin, Sonia Levitin, Linda, Ed Littlefield Sr., Ed Littlefield Jr., Vinod Menon, Jeffrey Mogil, Regina Nuzzo, Jim O’Donnell, Michael Posner, Jason Rentfrow, Paul Simon, Malcolm Slaney, Stephen Stills, Tom Tombrello, and Steve Wynn. Additional helpful comments came from David Agus, MD, Gerry Altmann, Stephen Berens, MD, Melanie Dirks, Baerbel Knaüper, David Lavin, Eve-Marie Quintin, Tom Reis, Bradley Vines, and Renee Yan. For generously sharing their thoughts on organization, I’m grateful to José Cerda, Alexander Eberts, Stan McChrystal, Paul Otellini, and Sting. A team of students in my lab helped to verify and format the end notes: Michael Chen, Caitlin Courchesne, Lian Francis, Yueyang Li, and Tyler Raycraft. Len Blum furnished a brilliant set of close edits. McGill librarians Robin Canuel and Susan Czarnocki helped point me to a number of sources cited in the book.
Thanks to Joni Mitchell for letting me write part of the book in her backyard (and I’ve got to get myself back to the garden . . .) and to McGill University and the Minerva Schools at KGI for their encouragement and support during the writing of this book. In particular, Martin Grant, dean of science at McGill, and David Zuroff, chair of psychology at McGill, helped to create an enviable environment of productivity and intellectual stimulation.