How to Use This Book

You can read this book from cover to cover if you like, but each hack stands on its own, so feel free to browse and jump to the different sections that interest you most. If there's a prerequisite you need to know, a cross-reference will guide you to the right hack.

We've tried out all the demonstrations in this book, so we know that for most people they work just as we say they do; these are real phenomena. Indeed, some are surprising, and we didn't believe they'd work until we tried them ourselves. The explanations are summaries of the current state of knowledgeoften snapshots of debates in progress. Keep an open mind about these. There's always the chance future research will cause us to revise our understanding.

Often, because there is so much research on each topic, we have linked to web sites, books, and academic papers to find out more. Follow these up. They're fantastic places to explore the wider story behind each hack, and will take you to interesting places and appear interesting connections.

With regard to academic papers, these are bedrock of scientific knowledge. They can be hard to get and hard to understand, but we included references to them because they are the place to go if you really need to get to the bottom of a story (and to find the cutting edge). What's more, for many scientists, evidence doesn't really exist until it has been published in a scientific journal. For this to happen, the study has to be reviewed by other scientists working in the field, in a system called peer review. Although this system has biases, and mistakes are made, it is this that makes science a collective endeavor and provides a certain guarantee of quality.

The way journal articles are cited is quite precise, and in this book we've followed the American Psychological Association reference style (http://www.apastyle.org). Each looks something like this:

• Lettvin, J., Maturana, H., McCulloch, W., & Pitts, W. (1959). What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain. Proceedings of the IRE, 47(11), 1940-1951.

Before the year of publication (which is in parentheses), the authors are listed. After the year is the title of the paper, followed by the journal in which you'll find it, in italics. The volume (in italics) and then the issue number (in parentheses) follow. Page numbers come last. (There's a crib sheet online: http://www.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/library/workshop/citapa.htm.) One convention you'll often see in the text is "et al." after the main author of a paper. This is shorthand for "and others."

Many, but not all, journals have an electronic edition, and some you can access for free. Most are subscription-based, although some publishers will let you pay per paper. If you go to a library, generally a university library, make sure it not only subscribes to the journal you want, but also has the year in which the paper you're after was published.

If you're lucky, the paper will also be reprinted online. This is often the case with classic papers and with recent papers, which the authors may have put on their publications page. A good query to use at Google (http://www.google.com) for papers online in PDF format using a query like:

        "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" filetype:pdf

Alternately, search for a researcher's name followed by the word "publications" for papers, demonstrations, and as-yet-unpublished research, a gold mine if you're learning more about a particular topic.

Recommended Reading

If you're interested in getting a general overview, rather than chasing the details of a particular story, you might like to start by reading a book on the subject. Here are some of our favorite books on our own pet topics, all of which make specialist material accessible for the rest of us:

• Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human by Paul Bloom (2004). Lively speculation from a leading researcher.

• Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence by Andy Clark (2003). Clark asks whether intelligence is bounded by our skulls or is part of the tools and technologies we use.

• Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain by Terrence Deacon (1997). A dizzying, provocative integration of information across different disciplines.

• Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett (1991). Psychologically informed philosophy. Consciousness isn't explained by the end, but it's a fun ride along the way.

• Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing by Richard Gregory (1966). Erudite and good-humoreda classic introduction to vision.

• The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do by Judith Rich Harris (1998). The Evolutionary Psychology of child development, a great read that challenges the assumption that parents are the most important influence in a child's life. See also the web site at: http://home.att.net/~xchar/tna.

• Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson (2004). How the latest developments in brain science and technology inform our individual self-understanding.

• The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker (1995). Compelling argument for our innate language ability and brain structure being reflected in each other.

• Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V. S. Ramachandran & Sandra Blakeslee (1998). Tales of what brain injury can tell us about the way the brain works.

• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks (1995). Informative and humane anecdotes about patients with different kinds of brain damage.

If you're looking for something a little deeper, we recommend you try:

• The Oxford Companion to the Mind, edited by Richard Gregory (1999). Authoritative and entertaining collection of essays on all aspects of the brain.

• Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (1979). The classic exploration of minds, machines, and the mathematics of self-reference. The back of my copy rightly says "a workout in the finest mental gymnasium in town."

• How to Think Straight About Psychology by Keith Stanovich (1997). How to apply critical thinking to psychological topics.