Hi everyone. Here I am again. It’s been a busy week and I hope you are enjoying the last of the Labor Day weekend.

We have a large class full of people from varied backgrounds with varied goals, and I’m glad if you’ve managed to connect to someone whose goals or interests are similar. I think it helps in online classes if you have a feeling of knowing someone.  

It’s not unusual to have a few people on board who aren’t used to an online classroom. I want to encourage these people not to hang back,  but to ask questions and for the rest of you to help them out. You’re not in competition with each other, after all. I’ll be glad to help too, of course.

Last week we read the New Yorker article that introduced me and now you to Dr. David Eagleman and some of his ideas, particularly his experiments on time perception.  

Anyway, this week we will discuss the first chapter of Eagleman’s book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. It’s the only chapter I know of that is entirely available on the Internet. If you find more, let me know.

In this chapter Eagleman gives us the main idea of his book, which is also implied in its title: the brain has a hidden life that we are not aware of. He ties this idea in to the historical realization in the 17^th century that the earth was not the center of the universe, as was previously believed.  Similarly we –our consciousness, that part of us that says “I” –our “egos” are not the center of our mental processes. Thus he ties together two concepts that have often symbolized or stood for each other, outer space and inner space. Both unknowns.

He traces the development of the idea of the unconscious mind through history and pauses for awhile to consider the theories of Sigmund Freud,  the psychiatrist who changed that way we think about ourselves. It’s fashionable now to point out all the mistakes Freud made. Yeah, he did. But that shouldn’t detract from appreciating the compassion, great genius, and influence of this major 20^th century thinker.

I’ve assigned you a short selection from Freud’s actual writings on the unconscious mind. We’ll see how what Freud wrote is similar to and different from Eagleman’s hypotheses. And why.

That Freud was onto something is obvious in many tales we tell and have always told that hint at an unknown part of the self. I’ll let you see examples of these tales and invite you to have fun playing psychoanalyst.

Also, in the writing section of our discussion, we’ll begin to practice quotation, a crucial part of academic writing that you may or may not know how to do. If you already know, great. If you don’t, here’s the place to learn!