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Oxford Companion to the Mind

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How The Oxford Companion to the Mind, 2nd Edition, Came to be Written

In 1977, I submitted a proposal to OUP for a Dictionary of Concepts. This was to be a collection of key ideas across the whole of science and extending into philosophy and the arts. Being a humble fellow, I had set up an elaborate Advisory Board with two tiers, a great list of possible authors, and enlisted the help of John Maddox - the distinguished editor of Nature - to be the joint editor.

This project was considered by OUP but was finally turned down as being too complicated, which, looking back, it probably was. However, several months later I was contacted by OUP's distinguished Editor, Michael Rodgers, who invited me to begin work on an equally ambitious project to be called The Oxford Companion to the Mind.

This time, I accepted primary responsibility and with the help of a few advisors, including Professor Oliver Zangwill who was my boss at Cambridge, began planning how best to undertake a project of this scale.

It was enormous fun compiling a wish list of topics and contributors, and a challenge to try to write readable entries myself. I had read philosophy at Cambridge, and Experimental Psychology under the great Sir Frederic Bartlett, as well as being involved in various more-or-less practical projects. These included experiments on escaping from stricken submarines, measuring increasing neural noise with ageing (all too evident now!), studying the rare and dramatic case of a man born blind and receiving sight in middle age, as well as trying to explain various bizarre phenomena of visual illusions.

Modern science builds on ideas and discoveries going back to the Ancient Greeks, though sometimes demolishes their edifices. But there had to be a limit to what could be included, and after much revision and time spent tying together the entries from over 150 eminent contributors, we finally published the first edition in 1987.

The success of the first edition demanded a successor. It was an intimidating challenge to tear it apart and start over again. In fact, it took a year to summon the courage (or foolhardiness!) to revisit it, with new priorities. Studies of mind and brain had moved on in leaps and bounds since the 1980s.

Physiologists had mapped the brain dynamically with wonderful new techniques, that answered some old questions and suggested vistas for new and future understanding. Freud, though still recognised as an incomparable genius, was no longer the only or clearest window to mind, and could hardly keep so prominent a place.

Attempts to make computers intelligent - and after all they do practically run the world - were suggesting how we may understand what brain physiology is doing to give us intelligence. This was not to say that answers lie ready-made in technology, but rather that the keys of information science do open doors to new ways of thinking about mind and brain, and the locked doors of failures serve as warnings and guides to research and philosophy. Even with modern tools, it is still not clear why, or how, the physical brain gives us consciousness.

In the twenty years since the first edition, these technological developments have inspired rich varieties of research into what brains do; some friends and colleagues who pushed forward the boundaries of the science of mind have passed away, leaving contributions that would have to be reconsidered; and many theories and interpretations of experiments have been revised and rewritten.

In this new edition of The Oxford Companion to the Mind, I hope we have managed to capture these developments, producing a stimulating and enjoyable book that will appeal to anyone interested in the remarkable private universe we carry around in our heads.

Richard L. Gregory
Editor, Oxford Companion to the Mind, Second Edition
9th September 2004

http://www.richardgregory.org/