Name: Who's in Charge
Rating: 4 (16 reviews)
Author: Michael S. Gazzaniga

What’s in it for me? Get an inside glimpse at how your conscience really works.

Somewhere along our evolutionary path, humans developed a conscience, or the ability to separate right actions from wrong actions. This ability allowed early humans to live in larger groups, and cooperate in new ways.

What we now call civilization would have been impossible without a conscience to help guide our behavior. Yet what exactly is this conscience, and how precisely does it work?

In the past 100 years, advances in psychology and neuroscience have shed much light on such questions, but have also raised new ones about how much control people actually have over personal decisions and behavior. In sum, who’s really in charge?

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why we once thought a small creature controlled the human brain;
how brain dysfunction may be at the core of many baffling diseases; and
how the modern legal system is essentially society’s birth control.

While scientists have learned much about the brain, we’re still on the cusp of true understanding.

It’s commonly understood that consciousness and decision-making are in some way influenced by the brain. But how does the brain really work?

While the brain as the locus of consciousness has been a topic of study for thousands of years, it wasn’t until recently that scientists understood the mechanisms behind it. For instance, in the sixteenth century, people widely believed in the idea of a homunculus, a miniscule creature that lived inside our heads, regulating the workings of the brain.

And up until recently, scientists thought that if any part of the brain were damaged, another part would simply pick up the jobs performed by the damaged portion, essentially replacing it. However, as has been observed with people who suffer quadriplegia – the paralysis of all four limbs following brain damage – we know that this simply isn’t the case, because otherwise they’d soon be moving around again.

While there have been plenty of misconceptions about how the brain works, the last few decades have witnessed tremendous discoveries. In the past half-century, scientists have found that contrary to earlier beliefs, the brain is composed of many circuits and areas that work in concert.

What’s more, we now know that particular parts of the brain actually specialize in certain tasks.

The human brain is made up of a left and right hemisphere and a brain stem. Each hemisphere is responsible for certain parts of the body, and performs particular functions that the other half can’t do. Meanwhile, local circuits, divided by defined areas such as the speech center, are always sharing information with one another, which allows the body to function and the mind to make decisions and develop.

So even though scientists are only just beginning to assemble all of the brain’s many puzzling pieces, we are closer today to understanding the human brain than we ever were before.

A particular part of your brain tells stories to make “sense” of information and inspire action.

So the human brain is divided into different areas, each vying for attention and trying to be help your body function. But with so much going on, how is it that we individually feel like a single, coherent consciousness, and not a cacophony of competing voices?

This curious situation has everything to do with the interpreter module, a part of the brain that allows it to make sense of all the competing pieces of information to which we’re constantly exposed.

Neither neuroscience nor philosophy have yet to decisively determine whether free will exists.

It can be troubling to think that there is no such thing as free will, but given how the brain’s interpreter module actually functions, this seems to be the case. Or is it?

The brain’s circuitry produces an action; and then, the brain’s interpreter generates an explanation for the behavior. But this begs the question, what’s really in charge up there in our heads?

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