To socialize, your brain needs to see and hear other people, yet your brain is sealed inside a bony box: your skull. How does an internal mass of tissue comprehend the world outside? How does it form social relationships? This groundbreaking book answers those questions and reveals the perceptual underpinnings of society.

Charles and Daphne Maurer provide a clear explanation of how the brain interprets sensory inputs, showing how rudimentary sensations evolve into social interactions at every scale from nursery to nation. Their novel approach shows how sights, sounds, and smells build social and political worlds. They offer fresh insights into broad swaths of the social sciences.

The World Inside Your Head brings science to life, interweaving cutting-edge research with eye-opening examples across cultures and eras. Its style is lively and free of jargon, yet its argument is rigorous and scholarly. It is an accessible and iconoclastic rethinking of conventional psychology.

Charles Maurer is a science writer whose work includes two other groundbreaking books with Daphne Maurer about perception, The World of the Newborn (1988), which received the Book Award of the American Psychological Association, and Pretty Ugly: Why We Like Some Songs, Faces, Foods, Plays, Pictures, Poems, Etc., and Dislike Others (2019).

Daphne Maurer is a Distinguished University Professor at McMaster University in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behaviour.