The Mind within the Brain

A. David Redish is Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Department of Neuroscience and the Graduate Program in Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota.

The Mind Within the Brain is a very valuable introduction to the neuroscientific paradigm and to understanding how we make choices. It is an enjoyable read, easy to relate to and very educational... is ambitious in its scope and style; not only does he want to explain how action-selection systems work in the brain, but also how they malfunction whilst delving into the philosophical and ethical consequences of analysing the mind in such a manner.

• Decisions and the brain ; 1 What is a decision? ; 2 The tale of the thermostat ; 3 The definition of value ; 4 Value, euphoria, and the do-it-again signal ; 5 Risk and reward ; The decision-making system ; 6 Multiple Decision-making systems ; 7 Reflexes ; 8 Emotion and the Pavlovian action-selection system ; 9 Deliberation ; 10 The habits of our lives ; 11 Integrating Information ; 12 The stories we tell ; 13 Motivation ; 14 The tradeoff between exploration and exploitation ; 15 Self-control ; The brain with a mind of its own ; 16 The physical mind ; 17 Imagination ; 18 Addiction ; 19 Gambling and behavioral addictions ; 20 PTSD ; 21 Computational psychiatry ; The human condition ; 22 What makes us human? ; 23 The science of morality ; 24 The conundrum of robotics ; Epilogue ; Appendix ; A Information processing in neurons ; B Gleaning information from the brain ; C Content-addressable memory ; Bibliography