How Brains Think

This book tries to fathom how our inner life evolves from one second to the next, as we steer ourselves from one topic to another, as we create and reject alternatives. It's not just a little person inside the head doing all this, though it's natural to assume that anything fancy requires an even fancier designer. Ever since Darwin, however, we've known that elegant things can also emerge (indeed, self-organize) from "simpler" beginnings. And, says theoretical. Neurophysiologist William H. Calvin, the bootstrapping of new ideas works much like the immune response or the evolution of a new…