Mind Wide Open
Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
Preface
PREFACE: Kafka's Room
How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is
compared with, say, my knowledge of my
room.... There is no such thing as observation of
the inner world, as there is of the outer world.
-Kafka
The idea for this book began with a nervous joke
- a handful of nervous jokes, to be precise. A
few years ago, thanks to a lucky convergence of
events and a long-standing curiosity, I found
myself in the office of a biofeedback
practitioner, lying on a couch with sensors
attached to my palms, fingertips, and forehead.
As we talked, the two of us stared into a
computer monitor, where a series of numbers
flashed on the screen like some kind of
low-budget version of the CNBC ticker tape. The
numbers documented precisely how much I was
sweating and updated several times a second.
I've never taken a lie detector test, but
something about having a stranger ask me
questions while keeping a close eye on my sweat
glands put me on edge. And so I started making
jokes.
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