Here he writes about sonie of the ways that the behavior of what we like to call our seU emerges moment by moment from all kinds of separate tools and workshops n brain, which neuroscientists call modules. Johnson begins with a gift that most of us take for we can talk ulmast all of us know granted mind reading Even be voices and gestures of the people ow to read subtle hints in the faces are just around us. That is we can instinct what neuroscientists do by learning to do with scanners and monitors Johnson takes a To learn about his own mind reading abilities, Baron Cohen devised by the British psychologist Simon*s in the test, you are shown a series of s6 diferent pairs of eyes on a screen Each pair has a distinctive expression For each you have to choose one from a of four that Baron Cohen adjective provides Is this pair of eyes despondent, preoccupied cautious, or Johnson finds that he has an instant gut reaction to each e paur of eyes But when he looks harder, he feels less and less sure what he sees. our natural ability to read people's faces is outside conscious thought. As with breathing or swallowing, we can't explain how we do it Baron Cohen and others believe that the skill depends partly on the amygdala, one of the brains emotional centers He has made brain scans of people taking his reading the eyes test using functional MRI which reveals which parts of the brain are working hardest from moment to moment When most people try to decode the emotion in a pair of eyes, their amygdalae light up. When autistic persons do it, their amygdalac are much dimmer 60 In other chapters Johnson explores some of the fear messages that are controlled by his amygdala traumatic fears that were triggered b a near disaster when a storm blew in a big window in his apartment He explores our brain chemistry, describing some of the natural s-drugs that we give ourselves without knowing it adrenaline, oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine, cortisol He learns how to recognize which natural high he is riding, or which bad trip he is enduring. He also learns some useful lessons about the ways our brains drugs affect our memories. There's also a chapter about his sojourn in a $242 million MRI machine, in which he reads a passage by the Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel, and then read a passage of his own. The test proves that nothing makes a writers brain light up like reading his own words