Cognitive science has become a major development for the study of the mind/brain. Its origins date back to Descartes and his belief that knowledge of the external world is filtered through some form of representation. Today, cognitive science aims to understand the brain's psychological and linguistic processes as computational systems which manipulate representation. As a science of cognition, it investigates all our cognitive abilities such as perception, memory, emotion, language and learning, bringing together the work of psychologists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, anthropologists, philosophers and linguists.

Cognitive science has become a major development for the study of the mind/brain. Its origins date back to Descartes and his belief that knowledge of the external world is filtered through some form of representation. Today, cognitive science aims to understand the brain's psychological and linguistic processes as computational systems which manipulate representation. As a science of cognition, it investigates all our cognitive abilities such as perception, memory, emotion, language and learning, bringing together the work of psychologists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, anthropologists, philosophers and linguists.

Can consciousness and the human mind be understood and explained in sheerly physical terms? Materialism is a philosophical/scientific theory, according to which the mind is completely physical. This theory has been around for literally thousands of years, but it was always stymied by its inability to explain how exactly mere matter could do the amazing things the mind can do. Beginning in the 1980s, however, a revolution began quietly boiling away in the neurosciences, yielding increasingly detailed theories about how the brain might accomplish consciousness. Nevertheless, a fundamental obstacle remains. Contemporary research techniques seem to still have the scientific observer of the conscious state locked out of the sort of experience the subjects themselves are having. Science can observe, stimulate, and record events in the brain, but can it ever enter the most sacred citadel, the mind? Can it ever observe the most crucial properties of conscious states, the ones we are aware of? If it can't, this creates a problem. If conscious mental states lack a basic feature possessed by all other known physical states, i.e., the capability to be observed or experienced by many people, this give us reason to believe that they are not entirely physical. In this intriguing book, William Hirstein argues that it is indeed possible for one person to directly experience the conscious states of another, by way of what he calls mindmelding. This would involve making just the right connections in two peoples' brains, which he describes in detail. He then follows up the many other consequences of the possibility that what appeared to be a wall of privacy can actually be breached. Drawing on a range of research from neuroscience and psychology, and looking at executive functioning, mirror neuron work, as well as perceptual phenomena such as blind-sight and filling-in, this book presents a highly original new account of consciousness.

When people confabulate, they make an ill-grounded claim that they honestly believe is true. There have been countless fascinating examples of confabulatory behaviour - people falsely recalling events from their childhood, the subject who was partially blind but insisted he could see, the amputee convinced that he retained all his limbs, to the patient who believed that his own parents had been replaced by imposters. Though confabulations can result from neurological damage, they can also appear in perfectly healthy people. Yet, how can confabulators so often appear to be of sound mind, yet not see their own errors?
This book brings together some of the most advanced thinking on confabulation in neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, and philosophy, in an attempt to understand this phenomenon; what are the clinical symptoms of each type of confabulation? Which brain functions are damaged in clinical confabulators? What are the neuropsychological characteristics of each type? What causes confabulation in healthy individuals? One reason why the study of confabulation is important is that there is wide agreement that the malfunctions that produce confabulation are malfunctions in significant, high-level cognitive processes.
With contributions from a range of leading psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and philosophers, the book develops an interdisciplinary dialogue that promises to increase our understanding of confabulatory neurological patients, and perhaps help us better understand memory, consciousness, and human nature itself.

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2005 Some neurological patients exhibit a striking tendency to confabulate--to construct false answers to a question while genuinely believing that they are telling the truth. A stroke victim, for example, will describe in detail a conference he attended over the weekend when in fact he has not left the hospital. Normal people, too, sometimes have a tendency to confabulate; rather than admitting "I don't know," some people will make up an answer or an explanation and express it with complete conviction. In "Brain Fiction," William Hirstein examines confabulation and argues that its causes are not merely technical issues in neurology or cognitive science but deeply revealing about the structure of the human intellect. Hirstein describes confabulation as the failure of a normal checking or censoring process in the brain--the failure to recognize that a false answer is fantasy, not reality. Thus, he argues, the creative ability to construct a plausible-sounding response and some ability to check that response are separate in the human brain. Hirstein sees the dialectic between the creative and checking processes--"the inner dialogue"--as an important part of our mental life. In constructing a theory of confabulation, Hirstein integrates perspectives from different fields, including philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology to achieve a natural mix of conceptual issues usually treated by philosophers with purely empirical issues; information about the distribution of certain blood vessels in the prefrontal lobes of the brain, for example, or the behavior of split-brain patients can shed light on the classic questions of philosophy of mind, includingquestions about the function of consciousness. This first book-length study of confabulation breaks ground in both philosophy and cognitive science.