Name: Incognito
Rating: 3.9 (183 reviews)
Author: David Eagleman

What’s in it for me: learn what your brain is doing when you’re not paying attention.

Think of your latest success story. Maybe it was a presentation at work that went really well, or an exam that you aced or even rescuing a cat from a tree.

What would you say if someone told you that actually, most of the credit doesn’t really belong to you. And neither does the blame for your failures, for that matter.

This is because at any given moment, the thoughts and feelings you are consciously aware of form a tiny fraction of what’s going on in your brain. You merely have the illusion of being fully aware and in conscious control of what’s happening in there.

These blinks illustrate what the subconscious part of your mind is doing through neuroscientific studies and examples.

You’ll discover

why a professional baseball player can hit a fastball only when he’s not thinking about it consciously;
why a brain tumor caused a 40-year-old man to become obsessed with child pornography; and
why to most people, apples seem more appetizing that fecal matter.

Despite what we think, we’re not really in control of our thoughts, feelings and actions.

Most people assume they’re consciously aware of and in control of pretty much all their feelings, actions and thoughts. Astonishingly, neuroscience proves them wrong.

In fact, most of your brain activity stems from purely physical and biological processes of which you’re completely unaware, and which you’re unable to influence.

Our helplessness can be seen in the way alterations to the brain caused, for example, by accidents and diseases, affect people.

One shocking example was the case of a 40-year-old man whose wife of 20 years suddenly noticed he had – seemingly out of the blue – developed an obsession with child pornography. After a medical examination, it was found he had developed a massive tumor in a part of the brain responsible for decision-making: the orbitofrontal cortex. Once the tumor was removed, his sexual appetites returned to normal.

There are also other, more subtle ways in which we lack conscious control over our mental lives, and it turns out this is often for the best: many processes in our brain, like decision-making, actually work best on autopilot, without conscious interference that would slow it down.

For example, if you ask a musician to play a piece, but tell her to focus only on the individual movements of her fingers, she’ll find this very difficult. It is far easier for her to focus on the music, and let her fingers play it free from such vigilant, conscious control.

Or what about baseball, where some pitchers can throw a fastball that reaches the batter in just four-tenths of a second. It takes five-tenths of a second for the batter to form a conscious awareness of where the ball is going, so why don’t batters always miss fastballs? Because they actually leave the conscious component out of their decision, and respond instinctively, much las you might duck if you saw something come at you quickly.

What we think of as reality is merely an subconsciously constructed hallucination.

Take a look outside. Do you think that what you see is an accurate representation of the world? In fact, what you see is more of a hallucination than reality.

Our visual perception system is not like a video camera: it doesn’t faithfully reproduce an image of the world, but instead just interprets the electro-chemical signals that reach the brain. And the same goes for other senses, like hearing or perception of time. From this mix of signals, our brain constructs a reality.

Different parts of the brain battle for control over our behavior.

Do you think of yourself as having a single, unified personality? Most people do.

But in fact, if we examine our brains more closely, we see that this is an oversimplification: the brain comprises several subsystems that each have a different function, and that often compete for control over our behavior.

Neuroscience has helped us understand the brain, but cannot explain everything.

As you've seen in the previous blinks, neuroscience has helped us better understand human behavior, especially its subconscious parts. Happily, we can take advantage of this new understanding in order to, for example, improve some social policies.

For example, we finally understand that for the legal system to be truly just, it needs to be personalized to the circumstances of each criminal – just like their unique biology.

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