Lectures - Autumn 2008

Making up the mind: How the brain creates our mental and social worlds

Speaker: Professor Chris Frith
15 November

Recent advances in our ability to observe the human brain in action reveal that most of what our brains do never reaches our awareness. This lack of awareness creates two complementary illusions about our relationship with the world. First, we think we have direct contact with the physical world of objects. In fact our experience of this world is based on indirect inferences made by our brains. These inferences can sometimes be wrong. Second, we think we are each isolated in the subjective world of our own mind. In fact we are strongly enmeshed in the world of other minds which we call culture. These findings have important implications for our understanding of cooperation, altruism and social responsibility.

CHRISTOPHER D. FRITH is Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychology in the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College, London, and Niels Bohr Visiting Professor in the Interacting Minds project at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. He is one of the pioneers in applying brain imaging to the study of mental processes. He is known especially for his work on agency, social intelligence, and on understanding the minds of people with autism and schizophrenia. The author of some 400 papers published in scientific journals, his latest book, Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates our Mental World, was published in 2007 by Wiley-Blackwell and longlisted for the Royal Society prize for science books, 2008.

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Why do we leave it so late? - David Canter
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Consciousness, will and responsibility - Chris Frith
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