In the first chapter we saw that conscious access to the machinery under the hood is slow, and often doesn’t happen at all. We then learned that the way we see the world is not necessarily what’s out there: vision is a construction of the brain, and its only job is to generate a useful narrative at our scales of interactions (say, with ripe fruits, bears, and mates). Visual illusions reveal a deeper concept: that our thoughts are generated by machinery to which we have no direct access. We saw that useful routines become burned down into the circuitry of the brain, and that once they are
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