my mind on books

I recently started reading Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World by Chris Frith. Here is a quote from the prologue that sets out the basic idea:

In this book I shall show that this distinction between the mental and the physical is false. It is an illusion created by the brain. Everything we know, whether it is about the physical or the mental world, comes to us through our brain. But our brain’s connection with the physical world of objects is no more direct than our brain’s
connection with the mental world of ideas. By hiding from us all the unconscious inferences that it makes, our brain creates the illusion that we have direct contact with objects in the physical world. And at the same time our brain creates the illusion that our own mental world is isolated and private. Through these two illusions
we experience ourselves as agents, acting independently upon the world….
By seeing through these illusions created by our brain, we can begin to develop a science that explains how the brain creates the mind. [p 17]

reviews at spiked review of books and Derek Bownds’ Mindblog

“limited preview” at Google Books

page for Professor Chris Frith, Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging