Author Guy Claxton uses the most up-to-date neuroscience and psychology, as well as sources from Homer to Shakespeare, in this masterly survey of the workings of the mind.
His preface begins: "I don't know about you, but my mind has a mind of its own. It wanders off while I'm trying to concentrate. It refuses to stop churning over the day while I'm trying to get to sleep...it forgets well known names at crucial moments".
If a distinguished psychologist such as Claxton cannot control his mind, what hope for the rest of us? Indeed, as Claxton lucidly explains, the whole idea of the existence of an "I", which can even attempt to control the rest of the "mind", is fraught with difficulties. It seems that what we perceive as reasoning, emotion, and even perception, are all secondary to the true work of the mind, which goes on almost entirely without our conscious knowledge.
Humans have created an astonishing array of explanations for the waywardness of the mind, ranging from gods and demons, through Freud's murky unconscious, to the actions of neurotransmitters.
The ancient Egyptians, for example, believed that sleep and dreams paralleled the sun god's nightly journey through the giant snake Apophis. The Homeric Greeks often explained their stranger actions by the promptings of the gods: if Achilles was irrationally angry, the obvious cause was divine goading. Claxton follows psychologist Julian Jaynes' theories that the Greeks may have 'heard' the words of the gods through a process similar to schizophrenia.
Greek philosophers started the scientific exploration of the mind.
Plato developed various metaphors for consciousness, including, famously, a charioteer trying to control two opposed horses, a virtuous one and a wild one. During the Enlightenment, Descartes divided the mind from the body, leaving the body an unintelligent machine, with the mind occupied in the methodical exercise of conscious reason.
Claxton groups the views after Descartes into three categories: the Romantic and mystical, where the unconscious is a supra-personal 'life force', verging on the 'soul'; the psychopathological, which sees the unconscious as 'the beast in the basement', the source of insanity, depression or neurosis; and the cognitive, which tries to explain the strangeness of how our minds work.
As Claxton shows, modern research is uncovering some of the mechanisms by which the "meat and goo" of the brain produce what we experience as consciousness, and just how much we all know and do without being aware of it. Phenomena like implicit memory, 'blindsight' and unconscious perception - and even creativity - all demonstrate that what goes on in our heads is far more than we understand: consciousness is often "the display cabinet of the mind, not its engine room".
This beautifully written and often witty book is highly recommended.
