“Simplexity, as I understand it, is the range of solutions living organisms have found, despite the complexity of natural processes, to enable the brain to prepare an action and plan for the consequences of it. These solutions are simplifying principles that enable the processing of information or situations, by taking into account past experience and anticipating the future. They are neither caricatures, shortcuts, or summaries. They are new ways of asking questions, sometimes at the cost of occasional detours, in order to achieve faster, more elegant, more effective actions.” A. B.

As Alain Berthoz demonstrates in this profoundly original book, simplicity is never easy; it requires suppressing, selecting, connecting, thinking, in order to then act in the best way possible.

And what if we, in turn, are inspired by the living world to process the complexity that surrounds us?

Alain Berthoz is professor at the Collège de France where he is co-director of the Laboratoire de physiologie de la perception et de l’action. [Laboratory for the physiology of perception and action]. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, and is the author of Le Sens du mouvement [The Brain's Sense of Movement] and La Décision [Emotion and Reason]. 

1. Cover Page
2. Title Page
3. Copyright Page
4. Contents
5. Preface
   1. The Wonders and Deceptions of Simplicity
   2. The Originality of Life
6. Acknowledgments
7. FIRST PART - Remember to dare
   1. CHAPTER ONE - Making the Complex Simplex
      1. Patterns and Small Worlds
      2. Tools for Life
   2. CHAPTER 2 - Sketching a Theory of Simplexity
      1. Inhibition and the Principle of Refusal
      2. The Principle of Specialization and Selection: Umwelt
      3. The Principle of Probabilistic Anticipation
      4. The Detour Principle
      5. The Principle of Cooperation and Redundancy
      6. The Principle of Meaning
   3. CHAPTER 3 - Gaze and Empathy
      1. The Repertoire of Gaze Movements
      2. How to Simplify a Problem in Geometry
      3. The Baby's Gaze
      4. Learning to See
      5. Gaze: An Anchor for Action
      6. Don't Repair, Replace! Vicariance and Substitution
      7. Who Is in the Mirror?
      8. Gaze and Empathy
   4. CHAPTER 4 - Attention
      1. “I Choose, Therefore I Am”
      2. Attention and Decision Making
      3. Selective Ignorance
      4. Attention and Vigilance
      5. Biased Competition
      6. Attention and Emotion
      7. Development of Attentional Processes
   5. CHAPTER 5 - The Brain as Emulator and Creator of Worlds
      1. Phenomenal Perception
      2. Dreaming and Newton's Laws
      3. Shortcuts
      4. The Brain as Emulator of Reality
      5. “Déjà-Vu, Déjà-Vécu”
      6. Resonance
      7. Redundancy
      8. The Critical Period, or the Weeping Camel
      9. Identifying Objects
   6. CHAPTER 6 - Simplexity in Perception
      1. Encoding the Continuous by the Discrete
      2. Controlling Uncertainty and Randomness
      3. Specialization and Modularity
      4. Speed
      5. Resolving Ambiguities
      6. Separating Content from Context
      7. The Brain's Feeling for Shape
      8. The Simplexity of the Haptic Sense: How Not to Crush a Raspberry
      9. Why Is the Tip of a Finger Round?
      10. Detecting Smells: Dimensionality
      11. Making a Simplex Decision
8. PART TWO - Walkingon the moon
   1. CHAPTER 7 - The Laws of Natural Movement
      1. An Essential Simplification
      2. The Secret of the Nevers Attack
      3. When Anatomy Dictates Geometry
      4. Internal Models
      5. Changing Variables to Reduce Complexity
      6. Uncertainty and Probability: Bet Rather Than Calculate
      7. Contraction
   2. CHAPTER 8 - The Simplex Gesture
      1. The Concept of Gesture
      2. Matching Gestures and Words
      3. Work Gestures
      4. The Sacred Gesture: Jesus and Buddha
      5. Synergies of Bodily Expression of Emotions
   3. CHAPTER 9 - Walking: A Challenge to Complexity
      1. The Lamprey and the Salamander
      2. Planar Covariation
      3. Gravity: Ally of Simplexity
      4. How Not to Fall
      5. Controlling Locomotion from the Head: A Great Invention
      6. Let's Hear It for the Skeleton!
      7. Do the Same Laws Govern Movement of the Arms and Walking?
9. PART THREE - The realm of thought
   1. CHAPTER 10 - Simplex Space
      1. The Brain Is a Geometrical Machine
      2. Space: A Common Way to Encode Perception
      3. The Problem of Multiple Geometries
      4. The Curious Geometry of the Colliculus
      5. Near and Distant Spaces: A Matter of Interlocking
      6. Changing Point of View
      7. Do Men and Women Employ the Same Simplex Mechanisms?
      8. Multiple Frames of Reference and Cognitive Strategies
      9. The Hippocampus: A Cognitive Map?
      10. Global and Local: Maps and Directions
      11. Space Is Encoded as a Grid
      12. Sleep Aids Memorization
   2. CHAPTER 11 - Perceiving, Experiencing, and Imagining Space
      1. The Concept of Simplex in Mathematics
      2. The Role of the Body in Sensory Experience
      3. The Concept of “Affordance” and Gibson's Theories
   3. CHAPTER 12 - The Spatial Foundations of Rational Thought
      1. Is the Language of Space the Same in Different Cultures?
      2. The Maze and the Garden
      3. Ecumene Space
      4. Drawing in the Service of Literary Creation
      5. Return to Reality
      6. The Particular and the Universal: Ockham's Razor
10. Epilogue
11. Notes
12. Index