How the Brain Thinks / Dr Graham Desborough

How does the brain think? An alternative way of looking at how matter produces mind.

Calling on new research in neuroscience and a new interpretation of old ideas, this book tackles the age-old questions of how thinking, consciousness and emotion happen.

We can be irrational and unpredictable but we are completely understandable, the author explains in this fascinating introduction to our complex inner world.

Chapters include explanations and key insights into:

• Attention, Consciousness and Our Internal Narrative
• Emotion - At the Core of Thinking
• Memory - Stored Experience
• Perception
• Biology of the Brain

At a fundamental level, he suggests, thinking happens when areas within the frontal cortex use the components of attention, emotion and memory to produce higher order functions such as consciousness and perception. These thought processes are similar in most of us. We are uniquely unpredictable simply because we all have a mix of different genes and experience.

The value of story, why you should drive with your lights on, confusion around definitions of consciousness and our voice within, and new ways of thinking about feelings and emotion, are some of the topics on which this book offers fresh insights.

˃˃˃ About the Author

Dr Graham Desborough has been a General Practitioner since 1982. In 1994, he wrote a Masters dissertation on judgement and decision making. He then set out to explain how we think. Finally, this is the result.

His other main interests are mountaineering, photography and his family that now includes three daughters and four grandchildren. He currently lives in Auckland, New Zealand.