And you certainly wouldn’t want to know all the details of the food supply of the nation—how the cows are eating and how many are being eaten—you only want to be alerted if there’s a spike of mad cow disease. You don’t care how the garbage is produced and packed away; you only care if it’s going to end up in your backyard. You don’t care about the wiring and infrastructure of the factories;
You don’t care about the wiring and infrastructure of the factories; you only care if the workers are going on strike. That’s what you get from reading the newspaper. Your conscious mind is that newspaper.
Eagleman, David. Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (p. 6). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
However, you’re an odd kind of newspaper reader, reading the headline and taking credit for the idea as though you thought of it first. You gleefully say, “I just thought of something!”, when in fact your brain performed an enormous amount of work before your moment of genius struck. When an idea is served up from behind the scenes, your neural circuitry has been working on it for hours or days or years, consolidating information and trying out new combinations. But you take credit without further wonderment at the vast, hidden machinery behind the scenes.
To the lion it is the lioness which is made to be loved; to the bear, the she-bear. To the broody hen the notion would probably seem monstrous that there should be a creature in the world to whom a nestful of eggs was not the utterly fascinating and precious and never-to-be-too-much-sat-upon object which it is to her. Our most hardwired instincts have usually been left out of the spotlight of inquiry as psychologists have instead sought to understand uniquely human acts (such as higher cognition) or how things go wrong (such as mental disorders). But the most automatic, effortless acts—those that require the most specialized and complex neural circuitry—have been in front of us all along: sexual attraction, fearing the dark, empathizing, arguing, becoming jealous, seeking fairness, finding solutions, avoiding incest, recognizing facial expressions. The vast networks of neurons underpinning these acts are so well tuned that we fail to be aware of their normal operation. And just as it was for the chicken sexers, introspection is useless for accessing programs burned into the circuitry. Our conscious assessment of an activity as easy or natural can lead us to grossly underestimate the complexity of the circuits that make it possible. Easy things are hard: most of what we take for granted is neurally complex.
Eagleman, David. Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (p. 89). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
If you sit up straight instead of slouching, you’ll feel happier. The brain assumes that if the mouth and spine are doing that, it must be because of cheerfulness.
Eagleman, David. Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (p. 134). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
My colleague Dr. Karthik Sarma had noticed the night before that when he asked her to close her eyes, she would close only one and not the other. So he and I went to examine this more carefully. When I asked her to close her eyes, she said “Okay,” and closed one eye, as in a permanent wink. “Are your eyes closed?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. “Both eyes?” “Yes.” I held up three fingers. “How many fingers am I holding up, Mrs. G.?” “Three,” she said. “And your eyes are closed?” “Yes.” In a nonchallenging way I said, “Then how did you know how many fingers I was holding up?” An interesting silence followed. If brain activity were audible, this is when we would have heard different regions of her brain battling it out. Political parties that wanted to believe her eyes were closed were locked in a filibuster with parties that wanted the logic to work out: Don’t you see that we can’t have our eyes closed and be able to see out there? Often these battles are quickly won by the party with the most reasonable position, but this does not always happen with anosognosia. The patient will say nothing and will conclude nothing—not because she is embarrassed, but because she is simply locked up on the issue. Both parties fatigue to the point of attrition, and the original issue being fought over is finally dumped. The patient will conclude nothing about the situation. It is amazing and disconcerting to witness.
What would have been a checkmate in a normal brain proved to be a quickly forgotten game in hers.
Once you have learned how to ride a bicycle, the brain does not need to cook up a narrative about what your muscles are doing; instead, it doesn’t bother the conscious CEO at all. Because everything is predictable, no story is told; you are free to think of other issues as you pedal along. The brain’s storytelling powers kick into gear only when things are conflicting or difficult to understand, as for the split-brain patients or anosognosics like Justice Douglas.
Eagleman, David. Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (p. 138). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Bill Kirby - internal narrative consistency is a big deal and maneuvering will be used to keep it. Eagleman’s “storytelling” and some authors’ “confabulation” are examples.
Although the ability to be flexible sounds better, it does not come for free—the trade-off is a burden of lengthy childrearing.
The main lesson of this chapter is that you are made up of an entire parliament of pieces and parts and subsystems. Beyond a collection of local expert systems, we are collections of overlapping, ceaselessly reinvented mechanisms, a group of competing factions.
Eagleman, David. Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (p. 148). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
A comprehensive understanding of a nation must include those parties that are not in power but that could rise in the right circumstances. In this same way, you are composed of your multitudes, even though at any given time your conscious headline may involve only a subset of all the political parties.
Eagleman, David. Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (p. 149). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
To the frustration of their loved ones, these patients unearth an endless variety of ways to violate social norms: shoplifting in front of store managers, removing their clothes in public, running stop signs, breaking out in song at inappropriate times, eating food scraps found in public trash cans, or being physically aggressive or sexually transgressive.
A mere four hundred years after our fall from the center of universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves.
Eagleman, David. Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (p. 193). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.