Incognito

David Eagleman, “Incognito: The secret Lives Of The Brain” Pantheon Books, 2011, 225 pp

Another must read book. Eagleman, a neuroscientist, argues that people only think they know what they’re doing. In reality, great ideas, decisions and opinions are all generated well before the conscious brain is in on the task. He convincingly describes that almost all our actions are run by alien subroutines, also called zombie systems, which include everything from forming words to picking up a mug of coffee. “When a professional baseball player connects his bat with a pitch that is traveling too fast for his conscious mind to track, he is leveraging a well-honed alien subroutine.” Yet all this still leaves room for the hunch. When you can’t get a straight answer from the unconscious brain, you can tap into its knowledge. “The next time a friend laments that she cannot decide between two options,” Eagleman writes, “tell her the easiest way to solve her problem: flip a coin … The important part is to assess her gut feeling after the coin lands. If she feels a sense of relief at being ‘told’ what to do by the coin, that’s the right choice for her. If instead, she concludes that it’s ludicrous for her to make a decision based on a coin toss, that will cue her to choose the other option.”

My Notes:

Pg. 4: 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.

Pg. 87: Instincts are traditionally thought to be the opposite of reasoning and learning. Most people consider their dogs to operate largely on instincts, while humans appear to run on something other than instincts-something more like reason. The great nineteenth-century psychologist William James was the first to get suspicious of this story. And not just suspicious: he thought it was dead wrong. He suggested instead that human behavior may be more flexibly intelligent than that of other animals because we possess more instincts than they do, not fewer. These instincts are tools in the toolbox, and the more you have, the more adaptable you can be.

Instincts differ from our automatized behaviors (automatized behaviors such as typing, bicycle riding, serving a tennis ball) in that we did not have to learn them in our lifetime. We inherited them. This was accomplished by natural selection over millions of years.

Pg. 109: When trying to understand the strange details of human behavior, psychologists and economists sometimes appeal to a dual-process account. In this view, the brain contains two separate systems: one is fast, automatic, and below the surface of conscious awareness, while the other is slow, cognitive, and conscious. The first system can be labeled automatic, implicit, heuristic, intuitive, holistic, reactive, and impulsive, while the second system is cognitive, systematic, explicit, analytic, rule-based, and reflective. These two processes are always battling it out. Note: there may be more than two systems; Freud postulated three.

Pg. 158: If you think genes do not matter for how people behave, consider this amazing fact: if you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, your probability of committing a violent crime goes up by eight hundred and eighty-two percent.

Pg. 166: In our current understanding of science, there does not seem to be any place to posit free-will. Of course, later work may find a place for it.

Pg. 183: Maturation. 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 because becoming socialized is nothing but developing circuitry to squelch our basest impulses.

Pg. 187: The U.S Supreme Court ruled, 5-4, in Roper v Simmons (2005) that those under the age of eighteen when they committed a crime could not be given the death penalty, overturning statutes in 25 states that had the penalty set lower.

Pg. 193: After Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter in 1610, religious critics decried his new sun-centered theory as a dethronement of man. One hundred years later, James Hutton toppled the Church’s estimate of the age of the Earth—making it eight hundred thousand times older. Then Charles Darwin relegated humans to just another branch in the swarming animal kingdom. At the beginning of the 1900s, quantum mechanics irreparably altered our notion of the fabric of reality. In 1953, Crick and Watson deciphered the structure of DNA, replacing the mysterious ghost of life with something that we can write down in sequences of four letters and store in a computer. And over the past century, neuroscience has shown that the conscious mind is not the one driving the boat.

Pg. 222: Occam’s razor: Scientists often talk of parsimony (as in the simplest explanation is probably correct) but this line of reasoning has failed in the past at least as many times as it has succeeded.