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If You Cannot Always Elicit A Straight Answer From The Unconscious Brain, How Can You Access Its Knowledge? Sometimes The Trick Is Merely To Probe What Your Gut Is Telling You. So The Next Time A Friend Laments That She Cannot Decide Between Two Options, Tell Her The Easiest Way To Solve Her Problem: Flip A Coin. She Should Specify Which Option Belongs To Heads And Which To Tails, And Then Let The Coin Fly. The Important Part Is To Assess Her Gut Feeling After The Coin Lands. If She Feels A Subtle Sense Of Relief At Being "told" What To Do By The Coin, That's The Right Choice For Her.

-David Eagleman

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If You Cannot Always

David Eagleman

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If You Cannot Always Elicit A Straight Answer From The Unconscious Brain, How Can You Access Its Knowledge? Sometimes The Trick Is Merely To Probe What Your Gut Is Telling You. So The Next Time A Friend Laments That She Cannot Decide Between Two Options, Tell Her The Easiest Way To Solve Her Problem: Flip A Coin. She Should Specify Which Option Belongs To Heads And Which To Tails, And Then Let The Coin Fly. The Important Part Is To Assess Her Gut Feeling After The Coin Lands. If She Feels A Subtle Sense Of Relief At Being "told" What To Do By The Coin, That's The Right Choice For Her.

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You´re Not Perceiving What's Out There. You're Perceiving Whatever Your Brain Tells You.

Many People Prefer A View Of Human Nature That Includes A True Side And A False Side - In Other Words, Humans Have A Single Genuine Aim And The Rest Is Decoration, Evasion, Or Cover-up. That's Intuitive, But It's Incomplete. A Study Of The Brain Necessitates A More Nuanced View Of Human Nature.

Even While It's True That We Are Tied To Our Molecules And Proteins And Neurons - As Strokes And Hormones And Drugs And Microorganisms Indisputably Tell Us - It Does Not Logically Follow That Humans Are Best Described Only As Pieces And Parts.

After All, Across The Population There Are Slight Differences In Brain Function, And Sometimes These Translate Directly Into Different Ways Of Experiencing The World. And Each Individual Believes His Way Is Reality.

It Is More Parsimonious To Assume That The Sun Goes Around The Earth, That Atoms At The Smallest Scale Operate In Accordance With The Same Rules That Objects At Larger Scales Follow, And That We Perceive What Is Really Out There. All Of These Positions Were Long Defended By Argument From Parsimony, And They Were All Wrong.

Consciousness Is The Smallest Player In The Operations Of The Brain.

Some Men May Be Genetically Inclined To Have And Hold A Single Partner, While Some May Not. In The Near Future, Young Women Who Stay Current With The Scientific Literature May Demand Genetic Tests Of Their Boyfriends To Assess How Likely They Are To Make Faithful Husbands.

The Left Hemisphere Acts As An "interpreter," Watching The Actions And Behaviors Of The Body And Assigning A Coherent Narrative To These Events. And The Left Hemisphere Works This Way Even In Normal, Intact Brains. Hidden Programs Drive Actions, And The Left Hemisphere Makes Justifications. 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 Measure Someone's Brain And See Very Little Activity During A Task, It Does Not Necessarily Indicate That They're Not Trying - It More Likely Signifies That They Have Worked Hard In The Past To Burn The Programs Into The Circuitry. Consciousness Is Called In During The First Phase Of Learning And Is Excluded From The Game Playing After It Is Deep In The System.

If You Cannot Always Elicit A Straight Answer From The Unconscious Brain, How Can You Access Its Knowledge? Sometimes The Trick Is Merely To Probe What Your Gut Is Telling You. So The Next Time A Friend Laments That She Cannot Decide Between Two Options, Tell Her The Easiest Way To Solve Her Problem: Flip A Coin. She Should Specify Which Option Belongs To Heads And Which To Tails, And Then Let The Coin Fly. The Important Part Is To Assess Her Gut Feeling After The Coin Lands. If She Feels A Subtle Sense Of Relief At Being "told" What To Do By The Coin, That's The Right Choice For Her.

The Deep Secret Of The Brain Is That Not Only The Spinal Cord But The Entire Central Nervous System Works This Way: Internally Generated Activity Is Modulated By Sensory Input. In This View, The Difference Between Being Awake And Being Asleep Is Merely That The Data Coming In From The Eyes Anchors The Perception.

Given The Billions Of Neurons, This Means There Are As Many Connections In A Single Cubic Centimeter Of Brain Tissue As There Are Stars In The Milky Way Galaxy.

All Life Will Die, All Mind Will Cease, And It Will All Be As If It Had Never Happened. That, To Be Honest, Is The Goal To Which Evolution Is Traveling, That Is The "benevolent" End Of The Furious Living And Furious Dying.

As We Develop Better Technologies For Probing The Brain, We Detect More Problems.

We Don't Really Understand Most Of What's Happening In The Cosmos. Is There Any Afterlife? Who Knows.

The Missing Crowds Make You Lonely. You Begin To Complain About All The People You Could Be Meeting. But No One Listens Or Sympathizes With You, Because This Is Precisely What You Chose When You Were Alive.

If You Ever Feel Lazy Or Dull, Take Heart: You're The Busiest, Brightest Thing On The Planet.

I Know One Lab That Studies Nicotine Receptors And All The Scientists Are Smokers, And Another Lab That Studies Impulse Control And They're All Overweight.

Impulse Control

We Are Nothing But The Product Of Billions Of Years Of Molecules Coming Together And Ratcheting Up Through Natural Selection, We Are Composed Only Of Highways Of Fluids And Chemicals Sliding Along Roadways Within Billions Of Dancing Cells, Trillions Of Synaptic Conversations Hum In Parallel, This Vast Egglike Fabric Of Micron-thin Circuitry Runs Algorithms Undreamt Of In Modern Science, And These Neural Programs Give Rise To Our Decision Making, Loves, Desires, Fears, And Aspirations. That Understanding Would Be A Numinous Experience, Better Than Anything Ever Proposed In Anyone's Holy Text.

Every Atom In Your Body Is The Same Quark In Different Places At The Same Moment In Time.

Modern Neuroimaging Is Like Asking An Astronaut In The Space Shuttle To Look Out The Window And Judge How America Is Doing.

When People Fall In Love, There´s Period Of Up To Three Years During Which The Zeal And Infatuation Ride At A Peak. The Internal Signals In The Body And Breain Are Literally A Love Drug. And Then It Beginds To Decline. From This Perspective, We Are Preprogramed To Lose Interest In A Sexual Partner After The Time Required To Raise A Child Has Passed - Which Is, On Average, About 4 Years.

Falling In Love

Knowing Yourself Now Requires The Understanding That The Conscious You Occupies Only A Small Room In The Mansion Of The Brain, And That It Has Little Control Over The Reality Constructed For You.

Humans Have Discovered That They Cannot Stop Death, But At Least They Can Spit In His Drink.

In The Traditionally Taught View Of Perception, Data From The Sensorium Pours Into The Brain, Works Its Way Up The Sensory Hierarchy, And Makes Itself Seen, Heard, Smelled, Tasted, Felt - "perceived." But A Closer Examination Of The Data Suggests This Is Incorrect. The Brain Is Properly Thought Of As A Mostly Closed System That Runs On Its Own Internally Generated Activity.

Reductionism Is Not The Right Viewpoint For Everything, And It Certainly Won't Explain The Relationship Between The Brain And The Mind. This Is Because Of A Feature Known As Emergence. When You Put Together Large Numbers Of Pieces And Parts, The Whole Can Become Something Greater Than The Sum.

A Mere 400 Years After Our Fall From The Center Of The Universe, We Have Experienced The Fall From The Center Of Ourselves.

Center Of The Universe

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Once You Begin Deliberating About Where Your Fingers Are Jumping On The Piano Keyboard, You Can No Longer Pull Off The Piece.

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Keep In Mind That Every Single Generation Before Us Has Worked Under The Assumption That They Possessed All The Major Tools For Understanding The Universe, And They Were All Wrong, Without Exception.

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All Life Is No More Than A Match Struck In The Dark And Blown Out Again.

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In My View, The Argument From Parsimony Is Really No Argument At All - It Typically Functions Only To Shut Down More Interesting Discussion. If History Is Any Guide, It's Never A Good Idea To Assume That A Scientiﬁc Problem Is Cornered.

The Brain Runs Its Show Incognito.

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I Always Bounce My Legs When I'm Sitting.

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Because Vision Appears So Effortless, We Are Like Fish Challenged To Understand Water.

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Behavior Is The Outcome Of The Battle Among Internal Systems.

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Evolve Solutions; When You Find A Good One, Don't Stop.

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When One Part Of The Brain Makes A Choice, Other Parts Can Quickly Invent A Story To Explain Why. If You Show The Command "walk" To The Right Hemisphere (the One Without Language), The Patient Will Get Up And Start Walking. If You Stop Him And Ask Why He's Leaving, His Left Hemisphere, Cooking Up An Answer, Will Say Something Like "i Was Going To Get A Drink Of Water."

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Just Like A Good Drama, The Human Brain Runs On Conflict.

Imbalance Of Reason And Emotion May Explain The Tenacity Of Religion In Societies: World Religions Are Optimized To Tap Into The Emotional Networks, And Great Arguments Of Reason Amount To Little Against Such Magnetic Pull.

Reason And Emotion

World Religions

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.

Odor Carries A Great Deal Of Information, Including Information About A Potential Mate's Age, Sex, Fertility, Identity, Emotions, And Health.

All Activity In The Brain Is Driven By Other Activity In The Brain, In A Vastly Complex, Interconnected Network.

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The Continuous Networks Of Neural Circuitry Accomplish Their Functions Using Multiple, Independently Discovered Strategies. The Brain Lends Itself Well To The Complexity Of The World, But Poorly To Clear-cut Cartography.

At Least 15 Percent Of Human Females Possess A Genetic Mutation That Gives Them An Extra (fourth) Type Of Color Photoreceptor - And This Allows Them To Discriminate Between Colors That Look Identical To The Majority Of Us With A Mere Three Types Of Color Photoreceptors.

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As An Undergraduate I Majored In British And American Literature At Rice University.

A Typical Neuron Makes About Ten Thousand Connections To Neighboring Neurons. Given The Billions Of Neurons, This Means There Are As Many Connections In A Single Cubic Centimeter Of Brain Tissue As There Are Stars In The Milky Way Galaxy.

Neuroscience Over The Next 50 Years Is Going To Introduce Things That Are Mind-blowing.

We Believe We're Seeing The World Just Fine Until It's Called To Our Attention That We're Not.

The Three-pound Organ In Your Skull - With Its Pink Consistency Of Jell-o - Is An Alien Kind Of Computational Material. It Is Composed Of Miniaturized, Self-configuring Parts, And It Vastly Outstrips Anything We've Dreamt Of Building.

It Is The Most Wondrous Thing We Have Discovered In The Universe, And It Is Us.

What A Life In Science Really Teaches You Is The Vastness Of Our Ignorance.

Among All The Creatures Of Creation, The Gods Favor Us: We Are The Only Ones Who Can Empathize With Their Problems.

The More Familiar The World Becomes, The Less Information Your Brain Writes Down, And The More Quickly Time Seems To Pass.

Societies Would _not_ Be Better Off If Everyone Were Like Mr Spock, All Rationality And No Emotion. Instead, A Balance - A Teaming Up Of The Internal Rivals - Is Optimal For Brains. ... Some Balance Of The Emotional And Rational Systems Is Needed, And That Balance May Already Be Optimized By Natural Selection In Human Brains.

Those With Anton's Syndrome Are Not Pretending They Are Not Blind; They Truly Believe They Are Not Blind. Their Verbal Reports, While Inaccurate, Are Not Lies. Instead, They Are Experiencing What They Take To Be Vision, But It Is All Internally Generated.

Instead Of Reality Being Passively Recorded By The Brain, It Is Actively Constructed By It.

The Brain Internally Simulates What Will Happen If You Were To Perform Some Action Under Specific Conditions. Internal Models Not Only Play A Role In Motor Acts (such As Catching Or Dodging) But Also Underlie Conscious Perception.

This Is What Consciousness Does: It Sets The Goals, And The Rest Of The System Learns How To Meet Them.

I Call Myself A Possibilian: I'm Open To...ideas That We Don't Have Any Way Of Testing Right Now.

To A Space Alien Or A German Shepherd Dog, Two Humans Would Be Indistinguishable, Just As Attractive And Unattractive Space Aliens And German Shepherd Dogs Are Difficult For You To Tell Apart.

Visual Cortex Is Fundamentally A Machine Whose Job Is To Generate A Model Of The World.

If Choices And Decisions Derive From Hidden Mental Processes, Then Free Choice Is Either An Illusion Or, At Minimum, More Tightly Constrained Than Previously Considered.

What Has Always Surprised Me When I Walk Into A Bookstore Is The Number Of Books That You Can Find That Are Written With Certainty. The Authors Tell Some Story As Though It's True, But They Don't Have Any Evidence That It Is True!

You Are More Likely To Believe That A Statement Is True If You Have Heard It Before - Whether Or Not It Is Actually True.

We 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 Mechanism, A Group Of Competing Factions. The Conscious Mind Fabricates Stories To Explain The Sometimes Inexplicable Dynamics Of The Subsystem Inside Brain. It Can Be Disquieting To Consider The Extent To Which All Of Our Actions Are Driven By Hardwired Systems Doing What They Do Best While We Overlay Stories About Choices.

I Spent My Adult Life As A Scientist, And Science Is, Essentially, The Most Successful Approach We Have To Try And Understand The Vast Mysteries Around.

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.

If An Epileptic Seizure Is Focused In A Particular Sweet Spot In The Temporal Lobe, A Person Won´t Have Motor Seizures, But Instead Something More Subtle. The Effect Is Something Like A Cognitive Seizure, Marked By Changes Of Personality, Hyperreligiosity (an Obsession With Religion And Feelings Of Religious Certainity), Hypergraphia (extensive Writing On A Subject, Usually About Religion), The False Sense Of An External Presence, And, Often, The Hearing Voices That Are Attributed To A God. Some Fraction Of History´s Prophets, Martyrs, And Leaders Appear To Have Had Temporal Lobe Epilepsy.

When We're In A Human Body, We Don't Care About Universal Collapse - Instead, We Care Only About A Meeting Of The Eyes, A Glimpse Of Bare Flesh, The Caressing Tones Of A Loved Voice, Joy, Love, Light, The Orientation Of A House Plant, The Shade Of A Paint Stroke, The Arrangement Of Hair.

It Is Only Through Us That God Lives. When We Abandon Him, He Dies.

If You Have Certain Problems With Your Brain But Are Raised In A Good Home, You Might Turn Out Okay. If Your Brain Is Fine And Your Home Is Terrible, You Might Still Turn Out Fine. But If You Have Mild Brain Damage And End Up With A Bad Home Life, You're Tossing The Dice For A Very Unlucky Synergy.

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.

...you Are Battered And Bruised In The Collisions Between Reminiscence And Reality.

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.

Everybody Knows The Power Of Deadlines - And We All Hate Them. But Their Effectiveness Is Undeniable.

Who We Can Be Begins With Our Molecular Blueprints - A Series Of Alien Codes Penned In Invisibly Small Strings Of Acids - Well Before We Have Anything To Do With It. We Are A Product Of Our Inaccessible, Microscopic History.

The Main Thing Known About Secrets Is That Keeping Them Is Unhealthy For The Brain.

Our Ignorance Of The Cosmos Is Too Vast To Commit To Atheism, And Yet We Know Too Much To Commit To A Particular Religion. A Third Position, Agnosticism, Is Often An Uninteresting Stance In Which A Person Simply Questions Whether His Traditional Religious Story (say, A Man With A Beard On A Cloud) Is True Or Not True. But With Possibilianism I’m Hoping To Define A New Position - One That Emphasizes The Exploration Of New, Unconsidered Possibilities. Possibilianism Is Comfortable Holding Multiple Ideas In Mind; It Is Not Interested In Committing To Any Particular Story.

This Is The Hallmark Of A Robust Biological System: Political Parties Can Perish In A Tragic Accident And The Society Will Still Run, Sometimes With Little More Than A Hiccup To The System. It May Be That For Every Strange Clinical Case In Which Brain Damage Leads To A Bizarre Change In Behavior Or Perception, There Are Hundreds Of Cases In Which Parts Of The Brain Are Damaged With No Detectable Clinical Sign.

People Wouldn't Even Go Into Science Unless There Was Something Much Bigger To Be Discovered, Something That Is Transcendent.

In Our Current Understanding Of Science, We Can't Find The Physical Gap In Which To Slip Free Will - The Uncaused Causer - Because There Seems To Be No Part Of The Machinery That Does Not Follow In A Causal Relationship From The Other Parts.

There Are Always Wonderful Mysteries To Confront.

As Walt Whitman Correctly Surmised, We Are Large And We Harbor Multitudes Within Us. And Those Multitudes Are Locked In Chronic Battle. There Is An Ongoing Conversation Among The Different Factions In Your Brain, Each Competing To Control The Single Output Channel Of Your Behavior. As A Result, You Can Accomplish The Strange Feats Of Arguing With Yourself, Cursing At Yourself, And Cajoling Yourself To Do Something - Feats That Modern Computers Simply Do Not Do.

Everything That Creates Itself Upon The Backs Of Smaller Scales Will By Those Same Scales Be Consumed.

Love Was Not Specified In The Design Of Your Brain; It Is Merely An Endearing Algorithm That Freeloads On The Leftover Processing Cycles.

The Brain "fills In" The Missing Information From The Blind Spot. Notice What You See In The Location Of The Dot When It's In Your Blind Spot. When The Dot Disappears, You Do Not Perceive A Hole Of Whiteness Or Blackness In Its Place; Instead Your Brain Invents A Patch Of The Background Pattern. Your Brain, With No Information From That Particular Spot In Visual Space, Fills In With The Patterns Around It. You're Not Perceiving What's Out There. You're Perceiving Whatever Your Brain Tells You.

What We Find Is That Our Brains Have Colossal Things Happening In Them All The Time.

Each Cell Sends Electrical Pulses To Other Cells, Up To Hundreds Of Times Per Second. If You Represented Each Of These Trillions And Trillions Of Pulses In Your Brain By A Single Photon Of Light, The Combined Output Would Be Blinding.

Think About The Brain As The Densest Concentration Of Youness. It's The Peak Of The Mountain, But Not The Whole Mountain.

Our Internal Life And External Actions Are Steered By Biological Coctails To Which We Have Neither Immediate Access Nor Direct Acquaintance.

Your Brain Is Built Of Cells Called Neurons And Glia - Hundreds Of Billions Of Them. Each One Of These Cells Is As Complicated As A City.

We Spend Our Lives On A Thin Slice Between The Unimaginably Small Scales Of The Atoms That Compose Us And The Infinitely Large Scales Of Galaxies.

One Of The Most Pervasive Mistakes Is To Believe That Our Visual System Gives A Faithful Representation Of What Is "out There" In The Same Way That A Movie Camera Would.

Nothing Is Inherently Tasty Or Repulsive - It Depends On Your Needs. Deliciousness Is Simply An Index Of Usefulness.

We're Trapped On This Very Thin Slice Of Perception ... But Even At That Slice Of Reality That We Call Home, We're Not Seeing Most Of What's Going On.

The Majority Of Human Beings Live Their Whole Lives Unaware That They Are Only Seeing A Limited Cone Of Vision At Any Moment.

Every Week I Get Letters From People Worldwide Who Feel That The Possibilian Point Of View Represents Their Understanding Better Than Either Religion Or Neo-atheism.

There Is A Looming Chasm Between What Your Brain Knows And What Your Mind Is Capable Of Accessing.

Interestingly, Schizophrenics Can Tickle Themselves Because Of A Problem With Their Timing That Does Not Allow Their Motor Actions And Resulting Sensations To Be Correctly Sequenced.

None Of The Individual Metal Hunks Of An Airplane Have The Property Of ﬂight, But When They Are Attached Together In The Right Way, The Result Takes To The Air. A Thin Metal Bar Won't Do You Much Good If You're Trying To Control A Jaguar, But Several Of Them In Parallel Have The Property Of Containment. The Concept Of Emergent Properties Means That Something New Can Be Introduced That Is Not Inherent In Any Of The Parts.

My Lab And Academic Work Fill My Day From About 9 Am To 7 P.m. Then I Zoom Out The Lens To Work On My Other Writing.

The First Lesson About Trusting Your Senses Is: Don't. Just Because You Believe Something To Be True, Just Because You Know It's True, That Doesn't Mean It Is True.

All Creation Necessarily Ends In This: Creators, Powerless, Fleeing From The Things They Have Wrought.

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