Usually when I intend something I have a pretty good idea what it is. Make a movie, find a car, sell a house … But this time I thought I’d try something different.

You see, I had agreed to do the filmmaker article for this month’s Herald, but I didn’t know what I’d write about. Absolutely nothing came to mind. So I intended that something would pop into my life to give me something to write about. It’s like creating a vacuum, and holding that empty space and watching for the Universe to slip something in.

But it was getting late. This was supposed to be written and turned in to our editor last night and there was still nothing. Literally nothing. The vacuum held!

TBH: You say in your new book Why We Believe What We Believe that it is the nature of our brain to search for its deepest truth. So where is self in this picture? Is self merely a construct in the brain?

ANDY: There’s a couple of very interesting answers for that question. I mean on one hand if we start from a neuro psychological perspective then the concept of the self and how we develop our beliefs, we’re sort of always trapped with the part of the conclusions we’ve come to…we’re trapped within our brain really. So how we perceive of ourselves as well as the rest of the world is all based on what comes into our senses - what we think about, how our brain processes information.