How Brains Think

What constitutes consciousness or intelligence? This is a question that has proved to philosophers to be an intellectual dead-end. Now William Calvin by looking closely at animal and human intelligence and a wide range of evolutionary evidence has broken new ground that will help us understand mental illness and illuminate the whole notion of what it is to be a person.

Calvin begins by asking what intelligence is. He moves to the Why of intelligence where evidence from chimpanzees is important before coming to the all-important How of intelligence the cerebral codes and Darwinian processes that operate within seconds to produce intelligent thought and action.