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To socialize, your brain needs to see and hear other people, yet your brain is sealed inside a bony box: your skull. How does an internal mass of tissue comprehend the world outside? How does it form social relationships? This groundbreaking book answers those questions and reveals the perceptual underpinnings of society.
Charles and Daphne Maurer provide a clear explanation of how the brain interprets sensory inputs, showing how rudimentary sensations evolve into social interactions at every scale from nursery to nation. Their novel approach shows how sights, sounds, and smells build social and political worlds. They offer fresh insights into broad swaths of the social sciences.
The World Inside Your Head brings science to life, interweaving cutting-edge research with eye-opening examples across cultures and eras. Its style is lively and free of jargon, yet its argument is rigorous and scholarly. It is an accessible and iconoclastic rethinking of conventional psychology.
— Ella Striem-Amit, Georgetown University
A thrill to read! With startling metaphors, the Maurers cut the jargon and tell it like it is. Read this, and protect yourself from psychobabble.
— John C. Mather, recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics
This engaging and accessible book explores how complex human behaviors emerge from simple neural and social processes. Using neuroscience, psychology, and quantum theory, the authors reveal how perception, adaptation, and context shape learning, bias, and social norms to rethink the roots of individuality, conformity, and collective behavior.
— Emmanuel Pothos, City St. George's, University of London
Charles Maurer is a freelance writer who specializes in science and technology.
Daphne Maurer is a Distinguished University Professor at McMaster University in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behaviour.
The Maurers are the authors of two previous groundbreaking books about perception: The World of the Newborn (1988), which received the Book Award of the American Psychological Association, and Pretty Ugly: Why We Like Some Songs, Faces, Foods, Plays, Pictures, Poems, Etc., and Dislike Others (2019).
1. Starting Points
2. The Brain and Mind
3. The World of the Newborn
4. Childhood
5. Categorization
6. Learning
7. Feelings and Sympathy
8. Quantum Thoughts
9. Norms
10. Complexity and Crowds
11. Tying It All Together
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index