Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Martin Cohen is editor of the Philosopher, and one of today’s best known authors specializing in popular books in philosophy, social science and politics. He has taught philosophy and social science at a number of universities in the UK and Australia. His unusual approach to the subject stems from his role in a key project at the University of Leeds in the 1980s to change the way Philosophy was traditionally taught in the UK, towards viewing it as an activity. His most recent books include Wittgenstein’s Beetle and Other Classic Thought Experiments (Blackwell, 2004), No Holiday: 80 Places You Don't Want to Visit (Disinformation Travel Guides) (2006), Philosophical Tales (Blackwell, 2008), and the UK edition of Philosophy for Dummies (2010).

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When you read something - like this - whose is that voice in your head? Is it yours - the reader's - or mine - the writer’s?

Why do we find statistical flukes so perturbing and extraordinary - like a run of forty tails when tossing a coin? Such events and such arrangements are no less likely than any other. The significance is only in our minds.

Why do children sometimes speak as though talking aloud to themselves, even when, on the face of it, they are talking to someone else?

This original and innovative book is an exploration of one of the key mysteries of the mind, the question of consciousness, conducted through a self-directed course of both practical and entertaining ‘thought experiments’.

These are not mind games in the Sudoku sense of puzzles or in the scientific sense of exploring the functions and behaviour of the brain. Nor are they just abstract philosophical games. Rather, here will find a one month course of inventive and stimulating exercises which provide a framework to personally investigate the way that your mind - and the minds around you - actually work.

Mind Games throws light on the traditional concerns of philosophy with a dash of psychology, sociology and political theory. Written as a fun, eye-opening and intriguing introduction to thinking about thinking, readers will at the very least come away with a sense of the myriad variety and wonderful idiosyncrasy of the mind and its surprisingly little understood world.

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Mind Games

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Words

Task

Spend all day trying to think for yourself

But already, we're off to a bad start! These words you are now reading, whose are they?

Whose is that voice in your head? Yours or mine?

When you hear someone speak, the words remain theirs – to be ignored or disagreed with as you choose. But somehow to read someone's thoughts is to allow them, however temporarily, to take over the language centres of your brain. For as long as you are caught up in what they say, the writer becomes your inner voice.

Does that mean that, for a moment, the writer becomes the reader?

Or does it mean instead that, for a moment, the reader becomes the writer?

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Mind Gamesby Martin Cohen Copyright © 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission of John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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