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There can be a large gap between knowledge and awareness. When we examine skills that are not amenable to introspection, the first surprise is that implicit memory is completely separable from explicit memory: you can damage one without hurting the other.
People don’t always speak their minds, in part because people don’t always know their minds.
As E. M. Forster quipped: “How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?”
People tend to love reflections of themselves in others.
This is known as the mere exposure effect, and it illustrates the worrisome fact that your implicit memory influences your interpretation of the world—which things you like, don’t like, and so
The illusion-of-truth effect highlights the potential danger for people who are repeatedly exposed to the same religious edicts or political slogans.
In other words, the gut feeling was essential for advantageous decision making.
When something bad happens, the brain leverages the entire body (heart rate, contraction of the gut, weakness of the muscles, and so on) to register that feeling, and that feeling becomes associated with the event.
When the event is next pondered, the brain essentially runs a simulation, reliving the physical feelings of the event. Those feelings then serve to navigate, or at least bias, subsequent decision making. If the feelings from a given event are bad, they dissuade the action; if they are good, they encourage it.
In this view, physical states of the body provide the hunches that can steer behavior. These hunches turn out to be correct more often than chance would predict, mostly because your unconscious brain is pickin...
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Conscious parts of the brain train other parts of the neural machinery, establishing the goals and allocating the resources.
Consciousness is the long-term planner, the CEO of the company, while most of the day-to-day operations are run by all those parts of her brain to which she has no access.
This is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.
This flexibility of learning accounts for a large part of what we consider human intelligence.
When the brain finds a task it needs to solve, it rewires its own circuitry until it can accomplish the task with maximum efficiency.
Automatization permits fast decision making.
By optimizing its machinery, the brain minimizes the energy required to solve problems.
the brain’s circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate to our survival.
Deliciousness is simply an index of usefulness.
Our evolutionary goals navigate and structure our thoughts.
the part that you are able to see is known as the umwelt (the environment, or surrounding world), and the bigger reality (if there is such a thing) is known as the umgebung.
Synesthesia is the result of increased cross talk among sensory areas in the brain.
each brain uniquely determines what it perceives, or is capable of perceiving.
reality is far more subjective than is commonly supposed.11 Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.
So the initial babbling is inherited as a preprogrammed trait in humans.
Another example of preprogramming is the so-called mind-reading system—this is the collection of mechanisms by which we use the direction and movement of other people’s eyes to infer what they want, know, and believe. For example, if someone abruptly looks over your left shoulder, you’ll immediately suppose there is something interesting going on behind you.
Prepackaged software can circumvent the explosion of possibilities that a blank-slate brain would immediately run up against.
human behavior may be more flexibly intelligent than that of other animals because we possess more instincts than they do, not fewer.
Collectively, these instincts form what we think of as human nature.
the specialized, optimized circuitry of instinct confers all the benefits of speed and energy efficiency, but at the cost of being further away from the reach of conscious access.
The more natural and effortless something seems, the less so it is.
the conscious you is the smallest bit-player in the brain.
The Babylonian Talmud contains a passage in the same spirit: “In came wine, out went a secret.” It later advises, “In three things is a man revealed: in his wine goblet, in his purse, and in his wrath.”
Minsky suggested that human minds may be collections of enormous numbers of machinelike, connected subagents that are themselves mindless.
Minsky wrote, “Each mental agent by itself can only do some simple thing that needs no mind or thought at all. Yet when we join these agents in societies—in certain very special ways—this leads to intelligence.” In this framework, thousands of little minds are better than one large one.
The division of labor allows specialization and a deeper level of expertise.
In such a framework, the larger system needs only to switch which of the experts has control at any given time.
The society-of-mind framework was an important step forward. But despite the initial excitement about it, a collection of experts with divided labor has never proven sufficient to yield the properties of the human brain.
The missing factor in Minsky’s theory was competition among experts who all believe they know the right way to solve the problem.
Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict.
Brains are like representative democracies.7 They are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices.
I propose that the brain is best understood as a team of rivals,
competing factions typically have the same goal—success for the country—but they often have different ways of going about it.
the brain contains two separate systems: one is fast, automatic, and below the surface of conscious awareness, while the other is slow, cognitive, and conscious.
The first system can be labeled automatic, implicit, heuristic, intuitive, holistic, reactive, and impulsive, while the second system is cognitive, systematic, explicit, analytic, rule-based, and reflective.10 These two processes are always battling it out.
the 1950s, the American neuroscientist Paul MacLean suggested that the brain is made of three layers representing successive stages of evolutionary development: the reptilian brain (involved in survival behaviors), the limbic system (involved in emotions), and the neocortex (used in higher-order thinking).
rational cognition involves external events, while emotion involves your internal state.
So when we talk about a virtuous person, we do not necessarily mean someone who is not tempted but, instead, someone who is able to resist that temptation.
Freely made decisions that bind you in the future are what philosophers call a Ulysses contract.
The origin of consciousness, he argues, resulted from the ability of the two hemispheres to sit down at the table together and work out their differences.
