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Editorial
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Ray Tallis admires the scholarship but is not so easy with the position taken by Chris Frith in ‘Making up the mind: how the brain creates our mental world’. In ‘Not all in the brain’, Professor Tallis—neuroscientist, gerontologist, philosopher, novelist, poet, literary critic and polymath—challenges Professor Frith's concept that the brain works to provide us with an illusion of reality, taking a Bayesian approach to probability, prediction and correction that sometimes gets it wrong but generally approximates to the actual world at a level sufficient to allow us to interact successfully with our environment (whatever that actually may be) and influence the future (page 3050). According to this analysis, we live a brain-derived fantasy that roughly coincides with reality but are liberated from the tyranny of what is actually around us. Our brain discloses the gist of what is going on but
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