One of my most recent books is a great tome. It’s called "The Oxford Companion to the Mind" and it’s in the series of Oxford Companions. There are Companions to the Theatre, Companions to lots and lots of things, animals, I think, and so on. "Companion to Philosophy" is a very good book and what it is, it’s multi-authored. I edited it and got lots of people all over the world to write for it. It took ten years to do. It’s a lot of work actually, it’s nearly a million words long and it was quite a success really. It became a book club choice and it went into paperback, it's actually the only Companion in paperback, which I was very pleased with, so you could buy it at a reasonable price although it’s a huge, great book, and I got virtually no money for it after the initial payment, if you like, because it sold cheaply in book clubs and all the rest of it, which is fine by me, it’s absolutely fine. Then I did a second edition, I think that may be have been a bit mad actually, to have to go through that all again, it’s an awful lot of work, and the new edition I’m not so sure about but I’d like to say the following, you see. I changed the philosophy for the new edition. The first one had a tremendous amount about Freud, for example, and psychoanalytical ideas, the sorts of things that appeal to a vast public. I thought when I did the second edition; I’m going to change a bit. I’m going to base it more on what we know about the brain rather than the mind. It’s going to have stuff about brain imaging, what’s called FMRI, magnetic imaging of the brain, to find out which bits of the brain become active according to what you’re doing or seeing or thinking, which is amazingly exciting in research but, of course, it’s not exactly in the public domain. So, in a way I wanted to try to sort of arrogantly push the public along the path that the neuroscientists are now travelling and I don’t know whether that second edition’s going to work because it may be just too scientific quotes and not enough resonating with people’s initial interests. It’s a point about communication, isn’t it? It’s only if you communicate something that people have not already latched onto is probably interesting.
