Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

by David Eagleman

The machinery is utterly alien to us, and yet, somehow, it is us.

If you were to injure your pinkie in an accident you’d be distressed, but your conscious experience would be no different. By contrast, if you were to damage an equivalently sized piece of brain tissue, this might change your capacity to understand music, name animals, see colors, judge risk, make decisions, read signals from your body, or understand the concept of a mirror—thereby unmasking the strange, veiled workings of the machinery beneath.

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.

consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain.

The brain is a complex system, but that doesn’t mean it’s incomprehensible.

As Carl Jung put it, “In each of us there is another whom we do not know.”