Book excerpt: Despite the remarkable cognitive power, humans are not alien beings living in their isolated universe but part of the Earth’s biosphere – a dynamic, intelligent system. The working of the human mind and society is built upon and follows the principles of the natural world. In today’s modern society, where technological advancement has significantly increased information accessibility to new knowledge, social sciences can greatly benefit from discoveries in natural sciences. In this book, the latest findings in life sciences are used as evidence to demonstrate and explain the mechanisms of psychological and social information processes. Mindsponge is a novel theory of information processing in the human mind. The mechanisms of information processing are present in all levels of the natural world – from ecological and physiological down to cellular and molecular. As a subset of nature, humans express these patterns in the way we think, believe, behave, and establish social constructs. By looking at the intelligent “minds” of nature, a more accurate framework for human cognition can be logically derived. The mindsponge theory reflects the physical, chemical, and biological laws upon the mental world, not the other way around. Throughout the book, readers will find interesting, often hilarious, stories of both the natural and social world, accompanied by clear scientific explanations and evidence. Each story brings to the table yet another angle to look at the unified principle of information processing within the biosphere: survive and thrive! The book also provides original quantitative findings employing the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) to demonstrate the consistency and applicability of the theory in studying psychological and social phenomena.