Primer : our human brain was not designed all at once by a genius inventor on a blank sheet of paper / Science is an ongoing process, not a belief system / Developing, changing. Genetics provides a window on human individuality / Though the brain has billions of neurons, wiring it all up may depend upon very simple rules / From birth onward, our experience of the world is dominated by the brain's continual conversation with itself / Children's brains are different / Your twelve-year-old isn't just sprouting new hair but is also forming (and being formed by) new neural connections / How you use your brain can change its basic structural organization / Tool use can instantly rewire the brain / Life experiences and addictive drugs change your brain in similar ways / Signaling. Like it or not, the brain grades on a curve / The brain achieves its computational power through a massively parallel architecture / The brain harbors many neurotransmitters / Anticipating, sensing, moving. The eye knows what is good for us / You have a superpower -- it's called vision / The sense of taste encompasses two roles : conscious taste perception and subconscious metabolic responses / It takes an ensemble of strangely shaped nerve endings to build a touch / The bane of pain is plainly in the brain / Time's weird in the brain -- that's a good thing, and here's why / Electrical signals in the brain are strangely comprehensible / A comparative approach is imperative for the understanding of brain function / The cerebellum learns to predict the physics of our movements / Neuroscience can show us a new way to rehabilitate brain injury : the case of stroke / Almost everything you do is a habit / Relating. Interpreting information in voice requires brain circuits for emotional recognition and expression / Mind reading emerged at least twice in the course of evolution / We are born to help others / Intense romantic love uses subconscious survival circuits in the brain / Human sexual orientation is strongly influenced by biological factors / Deciding. Deep down, you are a scientist / Studying monkey brains can teach us about advertising / Beauty matters in ways we know and in ways we don't / "Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants" / The brain is overrated / Dopamine made you do it / The human brain, the true creator of everything, cannot be simulated by any Turing machine / There is no principle that prevents us from eventually building machines that think / Epilogue.