More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
So we see that different factions in the brain can get involved in the same task.
The conviction that memory is one thing is an illusion.
Cognitive reserve—and robustness in general—is achieved by blanketing a problem with overlapping solutions.
the left hemisphere acts as an “interpreter,” watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events.
Hidden programs drive actions, and the left hemisphere makes justifications.
the interpretive mechanism of the left hemisphere is always hard at work, seeking the meaning of events. It is constantly looking for order and reason, even when there is none—which leads it continually to make mistakes.
Your brain, as well, interprets your body’s actions and builds a story around them.
anosognosia. This term describes a total lack of awareness about an impairment, and a typical example is a patient who completely denies their very obvious paralysis.
Fabrication of stories is one of the key businesses in which our brains engage.
Brains do this with the single-minded goal of getting the multifaceted actions of the democracy to make sense.
The brain’s storytelling powers kick into gear only when things are conflicting or difficult to understand,
Minds seek patterns. In a term introduced by science writer Michael Shermer, they are driven toward “patternicity”—the attempt to find structure in meaningless data.
Evolution favors pattern seeking, because it allows the possibility of reducing mysteries to fast and efficient programs in the neural circuitry.
dreams, which appear to be an interpretative overlay to nighttime storms of electrical activity in the brain.
dream plots are stitched together from essentially random activity: discharges of neural populations in the midbrain.
dreams illustrate our skills at spinning a single narrative from a collection of random threads.
Your brain is remarkably good at maintaining the glue of the union, even in the face of thoroughly inconsistent data.
consciousness exists to control—and to distribute control over—the automated alien systems.
A system of automated subroutines that reaches a certain level of complexity (and human brains certainly qualify) requires a high-level mechanism to allow the parts to communicate, dispense resources, and allocate control.
Think about when your conscious awareness comes online: in those situations where events in the world violate your expectations.
Consciousness is called in during the first phase of learning and is excluded from the game playing after it is deep in the system.
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. It would have economical programs for doing particular, simple tasks, but it wouldn’t have rapid ways of switching between programs or setting goals to become expert in novel and unexpected tasks. In the animal kingdom, most animals do certain things very well (say, prying seeds from the inside of a pine cone), while only a few species (such as humans) have the flexibility to dynamically develop new
...more
If you can’t outthink your opponents, outnumber them.
First, consciousness is probably not an all-or-nothing quality, but comes in degrees. Second, I suggest that an animal’s degree of consciousness will parallel its intellectual flexibility.
I propose that a useful index of consciousness is the capacity to successfully mediate conflicting zombie systems.
The more an animal looks like a jumble of hardwired input–output subroutines, the less it gives evidence of consciousness; the more it can coordinate, delay gratification, and learn new programs, the more conscious it may be.
Within the team-of-rivals framework, a secret is easily understood: it is the result of struggle between competing parties in the brain.
The main reason not to reveal a secret is aversion to the long-term consequences.
The act of telling a secret can itself be the solution.
intelligence has proven itself a tremendously hard problem.
If we hope to invent robots that think, our challenge is not simply to devise a subagent to cleverly solve each problem but instead to ceaselessly reinvent subagents, each with overlapping solutions, and then to pit them against one another.
Overlapping factions offer protection against degradation (think of cognitive reserve) as well as clever problem solving by unexpected approaches.
The team-of-rivals framework suggests that the best approach is to abandon the question “What’s the most clever way to solve that problem?” in favor of “Are there multiple, overlapping ways to solve that problem?”
Probably the best way to cultivate a team is with an evolutionary approach, randomly generating little programs and allowing them to reproduce with small mutations. This strategy allows us to continuously discover solutions rather than trying to think up a single perfect solution from scratch.
“Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don’t stop.”
Alcohol is not a truth serum. Instead, it tends to tip the battle toward the short-term, unreflective faction—which has no more or less claim than any other faction to be the “true” one.
when your biology changes, so can your decision making, your appetites, and your desires.
a slight change in the balance of brain chemistry can cause large changes in behavior.
When it comes to nature and nurture, the important point is that you choose neither one.
We are each constructed from a genetic blueprint and born into a world of circumstances about which we have no choice in our most formative years.
From an evolutionary point of view, the differences between mammalian brains exist only in the minute details.
Although our decisions may seem like free choices, no good evidence exists that they actually are.
First, sophisticated action can occur in the absence of free will.
What the lack of free will and the lack of free won’t have in common is the lack of “free.”
what we know of what goes on in the mind during sleep is that it’s very independent of waking mentation in terms of its objectives and so forth.
all activity in the brain is driven by other activity in the brain, in a vastly complex, interconnected network.
it seems that our brains crank away behind the scenes—developing neural coalitions, planning actions, voting on plans—before we receive the news that we’ve just had the great idea to lift a finger.
In a single cubic millimeter of brain tissue, there are some one hundred million synaptic connections between neurons.
there is some understanding that addiction is a biological issue and that drugs rewire the brain,
There is no meaningful distinction between his biology and his decision making. They are inseparable.
