Hardwired - How we know the mind: The Experiments, the Broken Brains, and the Question Science Cannot Yet Answer

By The Clumsy Monkey

How do you study a thing you can never see?
You cannot weigh a memory or photograph a decision. The mind is the one object in the universe that has to study itself - and for most of history, every attempt to do so went spectacularly wrong before it went right.
HARDWIRED begins with that problem and follows four routes by which we have learned anything trustworthy about the mind:

the experiments that exposed how ordinary situations move us to obey, conform, freeze, and talk ourselves into believing our own lies;the broken brains - a railwayman with an iron bar through his skull, a man who could form no new memory, a patient who could see without knowing it - that revealed which part of the mind does what;the long history of treating mental suffering, a record of confident error slowly giving way to something better;and the one question that may lie beyond the reach of any experiment: why there is something it is like to be you at all, and whether we could ever tell if a machine joined us in feeling it.

From Milgram's shock generator to a brain cut in two, from the invention of the "talking cure" to a famous study that mistook the sane for the insane, this is the story of how we came to know the mind - told with its triumphs and its embarrassments kept firmly in the same frame.
The honest version of this story is more interesting than the tidy one.
Part One of HARDWIRED, a series on the hidden machinery of the mind.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H9BKQHCJ
• ISBN13: 9798187758937
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 156 Pages
• Weight: 0.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"