by Ian Leslie
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to many people for sharing their time and expertise with me in various ways during the writing of this book. Any remaining errors are entirely my responsibility.
The following people were generous enough to take time to talk to me about their work: Dick Byrne, Jane Campbell Moriarty, Nancy Darling, Avinash Dixit, Petter Johansson, Aikaterini Fotopoulou, Robin Fox, Chris Frith, Ruben Gu
r, Stephen Holmes, Robert Hunter, Daniel Langleben, Charles Limb, Kang Lee, Will Self, Hunter Somerville, Victoria Talwar and Kevin Woods. My thanks to all. Thanks also to the many experts to whom I didn’t get to talk, but whose ideas and research inform this book.
The enthusiasm and energy of my agent Nicola Barr saw this book get off, and stay off, the ground. Richard Milner, Joshua Ireland and the rest of the team at Quercus provided excellent support and advice throughout. Antonia Senior and Michael Henderson of the Times commissioned me to write a piece about lying for Eureka magazine at a time when I was wondering if it would make a good topic for a book, as did James Crabtree at Prospect. My thanks to all.
A special thanks to Professor Martha Farah and her team at the Centre for Neuroscience and Society, at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2010 I was lucky enough to attend Neuroscience Boot Camp, a course that Martha runs for non-neuroscientists looking for an introduction to the field. I enjoyed it immensely and gained a store of intellectual stimulation that will last for years. I’m grateful to the brilliant scientists there who made the effort to explain the topic in terms even I could understand, and to my fellow Boot Campers for many fascinating conversations and much laughter over muffins, coffee and beer.
I fondly recall a lovely afternoon in Oxford talking to Kate Fox and Henry Marsh, who shared with me their unique perspectives on this topic and sent me down many fruitful paths of enquiry; I thank them for their generosity, hospitality and good will. I’m very grateful to Joanne Bain for reading the entire manuscript in draft and passing on her astute and perceptive comments. Ed Docx was, as always, an indispensable voice of encouragement and support throughout, and a wise counsel. I’m particularly indebted to Stephen Brown, who was kind enough to spend a lot of time with the manuscript. He held it to a high standard, and raised its levels of narrative discipline and intellectual rigour. My thanks go to the staff at the British Library and the Wellcome Library, and to Jeremy and his team at Brill, on Exmouth Market, for the good cheer and excellent coffee. Others who contributed ideas, talked things over with me or bucked me up when I needed it include David Bain, Laura Barton, Emma Docx, Stewart Wood, and my parents, Bryan and Margaret Leslie. Finally, a special thanks to Alice Wignall, my closest editor in every sense, who wielded her red and pink pens with enormous skill and sensitivity, helped me to keep faith in this book whenever my confidence in it flagged, and agreed, at the end of it all, to be my wife.