MindOS

Your brain does not show you reality. It predicts reality.

Every colour you see, every sound you hear, every emotion you feel, every memory you recall - none of it arrives from the outside world the way it seems. All of it is generated, from the inside out, by a hidden predictive system running beneath your conscious awareness. Neuroscience calls this system predictive processing. This book calls it MindOS: the operating system of the human mind.

And MindOS can be hacked.

In this riveting investigation, you will discover how a single spoken sentence eliminated a brain process that neuroscience had declared impossible to override. How a voice in an ICU changed a man's experience of post-surgical agony without a single milligram of medication. How a sugar pill triggered the release of the brain's own morphine - and how telling a patient their real painkiller had been stopped made the drug stop working, even though it was still flowing through their veins.

At the centre of the investigation is hypnosis: the oldest and most misunderstood tool in medicine, which turns out to be the most powerful demonstration in all of neuroscience that you are not perceiving the world. You are predicting it.

Drawing on cutting-edge research from Stanford, Johns Hopkins, UCL, and laboratories around the world, MindOS takes you on a journey through the architecture of your own mind:

• Perception: Why two people can look at the same photograph and see completely different colours, and why both are right
• Emotion: Why your feelings are not reactions to the world but forecasts about your body, constructed in real time
• Memory: Why your most vivid memories may contain events that never happened
• Pain: Why words can change what the body feels, and how Victorian surgeons performed amputations on fully conscious, pain-free patients using nothing but suggestion
• Psychedelics: Why psilocybin and hypnosis are mirror-image manipulations of the same brain architecture
• The Future: How a 92-second electromagnetic pulse can temporarily rewire a personality trait that was considered fixed for life