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Nothing is inherently tasty or repulsive—it depends on your needs. Deliciousness is simply an index of usefulness.
Uexküll began to notice that different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on different signals from their environment.
“Why do you think Truman has never come close to discovering the true nature of his world?” The producer replies, “We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented.”
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.
we have also developed neural machinery to solve specialized problems that were faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors over 99 percent of our species’ evolutionary history.
We know this, if for no other reason, than from the long history of failure of artificial neural networks that start off knowledge-free and attempt to learn the rules of the world.
Took it too far.
your psychology has evolved to solve social problems such as detecting cheaters—but not to be smart and logical in general.
Instincts differ from our automatized behaviors (typing, bicycle riding, serving a tennis ball) in that we didn’t have to learn them in our lifetime. We inherited them.
These programs are inaccessible to us not because they are unimportant, but because they’re critical. Conscious meddling would do nothing to improve them.
The more natural and effortless something seems, the less so it is.
Briefly glimpsed people are more beautiful. In other words, if you catch a glimpse of someone rounding a corner or driving past quickly, your perceptual system will tell you they are more beautiful than you would otherwise judge them to be.
Interestingly, strippers on birth control did not show any clear peak in performance, and earned only a monthly average of $37 per hour (versus an average of $53 per hour for strippers not on birth control).
Our ability to make subtle distinctions is exquisitely fine-grained; our brains are engineered to accomplish the clear-cut tasks of mate selection and pursuit.
Whatever other role they have, pheromones serve to remind us that the brain continuously evolves: these molecules unmask the presence of outdated legacy software.
This is not to say that choices and environment don’t matter—they do. But it is to say that we come into the world with different dispositions. Some men may be genetically inclined to have and hold a single partner, while some may not.
when people fall in love, there’s a period of up to three years during which the zeal and infatuation ride at a peak.
From this perspective, we are preprogrammed to lose interest in a sexual partner after the time required to raise a child has passed—which is, on average, about four years.
Fisher has found that divorce peaks at about four years into a marriage, consistent with her hypothesis.41 In her view, the internally generated love drug is simply an efficient mechanism to get men and women to stick together long enough to increase the survival likelihood of their young. Two parents are better than one for survival purposes, and the way to provide that safety is to coax them into staying together.
The unexpected part of the news is that the conscious you is the smallest bit-player in the brain.
As we begin to explore the stage we’re on, we find that there is quite a bit beyond our umwelt. The search is a slow, gradual one, but it engenders a deep sense of awe at the size of the wider production studio.
Alcohol removes inhibitions, allowing all kinds of opinions to escape uncensored. But you can’t blame alcohol for forming and nurturing those opinions in the first place.”
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.”
The division of labor allows specialization and a deeper level of expertise.
Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict.
Having differing opinions is not a drawback to the jury system, it is a central feature.
The rational system is the one that cares about analysis of things in the outside world, while the emotional system monitors internal state and worries whether things will be good or bad.
Philosophers working in the tradition of Immanuel Kant have proposed that the difference lies in how people are being used. In the first scenario, you are simply reducing a bad situation (the deaths of five people) to a less bad situation (the death of one). In the case of the man on the bridge, he is being exploited as a means to an end.
Something about interacting with the person up close stops most people from pushing the man to his death. Why? Because that sort of personal interaction activates the emotional networks. It changes the problem from an abstract, impersonal math problem into a personal, emotional decision.
People register emotionally when they have to push someone; when they only have to tip a lever, their brain behaves like Star Trek’s Mr. Spock.
Because both of the neural systems battle to control the single output channel of behavior, emotions can tip the balance of decision making. This ancient battle has turned into a directive of sorts for many people: If it feels bad, it is probably wrong.
a democracy split across the aisle may be just what you want—a takeover in either direction would almost certainly prove less optimal.
Kahneman and Tversky’s preference reversal comes about because the discounting has a particular shape: it drops off very quickly into the near future, and then flattens out a bit, as though more distant times are all about the same.
Discounting + constant?
Subprime mortgage offers were perfectly optimized to take advantage of the I-want-it-now system: buy this beautiful house now with very low payments, impress your friends and parents, live more comfortably than you thought you could.
speculative bubbles are caused by “contagious optimism, seemingly impervious to facts, that often takes hold when prices are rising. Bubbles are primarily social phenomena; until we understand and address the psychology that fuels them, they’re going to keep forming.”
Your behavior—what you do in the world—is simply the end result of the battles.
Freely made decisions that bind you in the future are what philosophers call a Ulysses contract.
when you cannot rely on your own rational systems, borrow someone else’s.
Imagine that the word apple is flashed to the left hemisphere, while the word pencil is simultaneously flashed to the right hemisphere. When a split-brain patient is asked to grab the item he just saw, the right hand will pick up the apple while the left hand will simultaneously pick up the pencil.
Biology never checks off a problem and calls it quits. It reinvents solutions continually. The end product of that approach is a highly overlapping system of solutions—the necessary condition for a team-of-rivals architecture.34
An advantage of overlapping domains can be seen in the newly discovered phenomenon of cognitive reserve.
This Stroop interference unmasks the clash between the strong, involuntary and automatic impulse to read the word and the unusual, deliberate, and effortful task demand to state the color of the print.
Gazzaniga and LeDoux to conclude that the left hemisphere acts as an “interpreter,” watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events. And the left hemisphere works this way even in normal, intact brains. Hidden programs drive actions, and the left hemisphere makes justifications.
“These findings all suggest that 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.”
If you sit up straight instead of slouching, you’ll feel happier.
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,
Evolution favors pattern seeking, because it allows the possibility of reducing mysteries to fast and efficient programs in the neural circuitry.
consciousness exists to control—and to distribute control over—the automated alien systems.
I propose that a useful index of consciousness is the capacity to successfully mediate conflicting zombie systems.
Pennebaker concluded that “the act of not discussing or confiding the event with another may be more damaging than having experienced the event per se.”
