David Eagleman - Incognito

*** David Eagleman - Incognito ***
The first thing we learn from studying our own circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control. The vast jungles of neurons operate their own programs. The conscious you—the I that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning—is the smallest bit of what’s transpiring in your brain. Although we are dependent on the functioning of the brain for our inner lives, it runs its own show. Most of its operations are above the security clearance of the conscious mind. The I simply has no right of entry. Your consciousness is like a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot.
- Consciousness developed because it was advantageous, but advantageous only in limited amounts.
- One does not need to be consciously aware to perform motor acts.
- Internal models not only play a role in motor acts (such as catching or dodging) but also underlie conscious perception. As early as the 1940s, thinkers began to toy with the idea that perception works not by building up bits of captured data, but instead by matching expectations to incoming sensory data.
- The bottom line is that time is a mental construction, not an accurate barometer of what’s happening “out there.”
- So the first lesson about trusting your senses is: don’t. Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it’s true, that doesn’t mean it is true. The most important maxim for fighter pilots is “Trust your instruments.” This is because your senses will tell you the most inglorious lies, and if you trust them—instead of your cockpit dials—you’ll crash.
- After all, we are aware of very little of what is “out there.” The brain makes time-saving and resource-saving assumptions and tries to see the world only as well as it needs to. And as we realize that we are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them, we have taken the first step in the journey of self-excavation. We see that what we perceive in the outside world is generated by parts of the brain to which we do not have access.
- People don’t always speak their minds, in part because people don’t always know their minds. As E. M. Forster quipped: “How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?”
- People tend to love reflections of themselves in others. Psychologists interpret this as an unconscious self-love, or perhaps a comfort level with things that are familiar —and they term this implicit egotism.
- We are influenced by drives to which we have little access, and which we never would have believed had not the statistics laid them bare.
- Priming underscores the point that implicit memory systems are fundamentally separate from explicit memory systems: even when the second one has lost the data, the former one has a lock on it.
- Beyond a temporary tickling of the brain, the effects of previous exposure can be long lasting. If you have seen a picture of someone’s face before, you will judge them to be more attractive upon a later viewing. This is true even when you have no recollection of ever having seen them previously.19 This is known as the mere exposure effect, and it illustrates the worrisome fact that your implicit memory influences your interpretation of the world—which things you like, don’t like, and so on.
- Another real-world manifestation of implicit memory is known as the illusion-of-truth effect: you are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before—whether or not it is actually true.
- The illusion-of-truth effect highlights the potential danger for people who are repeatedly exposed to the same religious edicts or political slogans.
- If you cannot always elicit a straight answer from the unconscious brain, how can you access its knowledge? Sometimes the trick is merely to probe what your gut is telling you.
- The brain's circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate to our survival.
Body - Not abnormal in any pathological sense; they are simply unusual in a statistical sense.
- Reality is far more subjective than is commonly supposed. Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.
- The programs of instinct, carved by the pressures of evolution, keep our behaviors running smoothly and steer our cognition with a firm hand.
- This is not to say that choices and environment don’t matter—they do. But it is to say that we come into the world with different dispositions. Some men may be genetically inclined to have and hold a single partner, while some may not.
- Not only do we run alien subroutines; we also justify them. We have ways of retrospectively telling stories about our actions as though the actions were always our idea.
- the left hemisphere acts as an “interpreter,” watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events. Hidden programs drive actions, and the left hemisphere makes justifications.
- Minds seek patterns. In a term introduced by science writer Michael Shermer, they are driven toward “patternicity”—the attempt to find structure in meaningless data.42 Evolution favors pattern seeking, because it allows the possibility of reducing mysteries to fast and efficient programs in the neural circuitry.
- hidden drives and desires can lurk undetected behind the neural machinery of socialization. When the frontal lobe is compromised, people become “disinhibited,” unmasking the presence of the seedier elements in the neural democracy.
- When it comes to nature and nurture, the important point is that you choose neither one. We are each constructed from a genetic blueprint and born into a world of circumstances about which we have no choice in our most formative years. The complex interactions of genes and environment means that the citizens of our society possess different perspectives, dissimilar personalities, and varied capacities for decision making. These are not free-will choices of the citizens; these are the hands of cards we’re dealt.
- As far as the legal system sees it, humans are practical reasoners. We use conscious deliberation when deciding how to act. We make our own decisions. Thus, in the legal system, a prosecutor must not merely show a guilty act, but a guilty mind as well.11 And as long as there is nothing hindering the mind in its control of the body, it is assumed that the actor is fully responsible for his actions. This view of the practical reasoner is both intuitive and—as should be clear by this point in the book—deeply problematic. There is a tension between biology and law on this intuition. After all, we are driven to be who we are by vast and complex biological networks. We do not come to the table as blank slates, free to take in the world and come to open-ended decisions. In fact, it is not clear how much the conscious you—as opposed to the genetic and neural you—gets to do any deciding at all.
- principle of sufficient automatism. The principle arises naturally from the understanding that free will, if it exists, is only a small factor riding on top of enormous automated machinery. So small that we may be able to think about bad decision making in the same way we think about any other physical process, such as diabetes or lung disease.16 The principle states that the answer to the free-will question simply does not matter. Even if free will is conclusively proven to exist one hundred years from now, it will not change the fact that human behavior largely operates almost without regard to volition’s invisible hand.
- And really, that’s all maturation is. The main difference between teenage and adult brains is the development of the frontal lobes. The human prefrontal cortex does not fully develop until the early twenties, and this underlies the impulsive behavior of teenagers. The frontal lobes are sometimes called the organ of socialization, because becoming socialized is nothing but developing circuitry to squelch our basest impulses.
- Further, as we come to better understand the brain, we can concentrate on building societal incentives to encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior. Effective law requires effective behavioral models: understanding not just how we would like people to behave, but how they actually behave.