Synopses & Reviews
Nicholas Humphrey's writings about the evolution of the mind have done much to set the agenda for contemporary psychology. Here, in a series of riveting essays, he invites us to 'take another look' at a variety of the central and not-so-central issues: the evolution of consciousness, the nature of the self, multiple personality disorder, the placebo effect, cave art, religious miracles, medieval animal trials, the seductions of dictatorship, and much more.
Review
"No other theoretical psychologist is so accessibly clear, and at the same time so provocatively philosophical."--Lorna Sage
"Nobody else brings such an astonishing range of knowledge to bear on these issues."--Daniel Dennett
"Humphrey's distinctive prose is the golden bowl in which his ripe and shining theories are held."--Antonella Gambotto
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. [340]-361) and index.
Table of Contents
1. On Taking Another Look
2. One Self: a Meditation on the Unity of Consciousness
3. What Is Your Substance, Whereof Are You Made?
4. Speaking for Our Selves: an Assessment of Multiple Personality
5. Love Knots
6. The Uses of Consciousnes
7. Farewell, Thou Art Too Dear for My Possessing*
8. Great Expectations: the Evolutionary Psychology of Faith Healing and the Placebo Effect
9. Scientific Shakespeare
10. How to solve the Mind Body Problem
11. The Privitization of Sensation
12. Mind in Nature
13. Cave Art, Autism and the Evolution of the Human Mind
14. The Deformed Transformed
15. Varieties of Altruism and the Common Ground between Them
16. Bugs and Beasts before the Law
17. The Number of the Beast
18. Behold the Man
19. Tall Stories from Little Acorns Grow
20. Hello Aquarius
21. What Shall We Tell the Children?
22. Arms and the Man
23. Death in Tripoli
24. Follow my leader