Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
When the brain changes, so do we.
Most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control.
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.
Brains are in the business of gathering information and steering behavior appropriately. It doesn’t matter whether consciousness is involved in the decision making. And most of the time, it’s not.
Consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain.
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.
The brain works its machinations in secret, conjuring ideas like tremendous magic. It does not allow its colossal operating system to be probed by conscious cognition. The brain runs its show incognito.
Almost the entirety of what happens in your mental life is not under your conscious control, and the truth is that it’s better this way.
Once you begin deliberating about where your fingers are jumping on the piano keyboard, you can no longer pull off the piece.
Consciousness gives you a summary that is useful for the larger picture, useful at the scale of apples and rivers and humans
We have no access to the rapid and automatic machinery that gathers and estimates the statistics of the world. We’re merely the beneficiaries riding on top of the machinery, enjoying the play of light and shadows.
Introspection has little meaningful insight into what is happening behind the scenes.
Vision does not simply exist when a person confronts the world with clear eyes. Instead, an interpretation of the electrochemical signals streaming along the optic nerves has to be trained up.
We see not with our eyes but rather with our brains.
Internal models generate expectations about when and where
Awareness of your surroundings occurs only when sensory inputs violate expectations.
When the world is successfully predicted away, awareness is not needed because the brain is doing its job well.
When these new situations cause your normal expectations to be violated, consciousness comes online and your internal model adjusts.
Your perceptual world always lags behind the real world.
The bottom line is that time is a mental construction, not an accurate barometer of what’s happening “out there.
Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it’s true, that doesn’t mean it is true.
Consciousness is useful, it is useful in small quantities, and for very particular kinds of tasks.
gut feeling was essential for advantageous decision making.
So what role does the conscious mind play, if any, in all your know-how? A big one, it turns out—because much of the knowledge stored in the depths of the unconscious brain began life in the form of conscious plans.
Consciousness ... sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.
Nothing is inherently tasty or repulsive—it depends on your needs. Deliciousness is simply an index of usefulness.
the brain, like the heart, doesn’t require a particular culture in order to express social behavior—that program comes pre-bundled with the hardware.
The more natural and effortless something seems, the less so it is.
The rule of thumb is this: when you cannot rely on your own rational systems, borrow someone else’s.
we harbor mechanical, “alien” subroutines to which we have no access and of which we have no acquaintance. Almost all of our actions—from producing speech to picking up a mug of coffee—are run by alien subroutines, also known as zombie systems.
Some alien subroutines are instinctual, while some are learned; burned down into the circuitry.
We are constantly fabricating and telling stories about the alien processes running under the hood.
This idea of retrospective storytelling suggests that we come to know our own attitudes and emotions, at least partially, by inferring them from observations of our own behavior.
If you hold a pencil between your teeth while you read something, you’ll think the material is funnier; that’s because the interpretation is influenced by the smile on your face.
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.
Storytelling powers kick into gear only when things are conflicting or difficult to understand,
consciousness exists to control—and to distribute control over—the automated alien systems.
As long as the zombie subroutines are running smoothly, the CEO can sleep.
your conscious awareness comes online: in those situations where events in the world violate your expectations.
Consciousness seems to be this: an animal composed of a giant collection of zombie systems would be energy efficient but cognitively inflexible. It would have economical programs for doing particular, simple tasks, but it wouldn’t have rapid ways of switching between programs or setting goals to become expert in novel and unexpected tasks.
only a few species (such as humans) have the flexibility to dynamically develop new software.
Within the team-of-rivals framework, a secret is easily understood: it is the result of struggle between competing parties in the brain. One part of the brain wants to reveal something, and another part does not want to.
Many of us like to believe that all adults possess the same capacity to make sound choices. It’s a nice idea, but it’s wrong.
People’s brains can be vastly different — people do not choose their own developmental path.
Although our decisions may seem like free choices, no good evidence exists that they actually are.
Like your heartbeat, breathing, blinking, and swallowing, even your mental machinery can run on autopilot.
As far as we can tell, all activity in the brain is driven by other activity in the brain, in a vastly complex, interconnected network.
Could it be true that the conscious mind is the last one in the chain of command to receive any information?
If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn’t be smart enough to understand them.