We know that if you remove or damage a part of the brain, your personality fundamentally changes. We've known this in some way for a long time but dualist intuition is strong. You go to a conference and people are talking about the most intimate aspect of yourself. Maybe you're sent some morality, which I'm very interested in. But nobody is going to stand up and say, well, it's not in the brain at all.
In his expansive new book, "Psych: The Story of the Human Mind," Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, lays out, in his words, "basically everything I know about the mind." And when he says everything, he means it. Where does consciousness come from? Does IQ matter? What makes us happy? Was Sigmund Freud a madman? The answers to these questions (and more) are all in Paul's book — and in this episode.
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