Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

by David Eagleman

Your brain is in the dark but your mind constructs light.

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

This is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.

Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.

The brain’s storytelling powers kick into gear only when things are conflicting or difficult to understand,

dreams illustrate our skills at spinning a single narrative from a collection of random threads.

From an evolutionary point of view, the purpose of consciousness seems to be this: an animal composed of a giant collection of zombie systems would be energy efficient but cognitively inflexible.

Your most fundamental drives are stitched into the fabric of your neural circuitry, and they are inaccessible to you.

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.

When it comes to the nature versus nurture question, the answer almost always includes both.

If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn’t be smart enough to understand them.