More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
You become who you are not because of what grows in your brain, but because of what is removed.
The surprise is that a faded memory doesn’t seem faded to you. You feel, or at least assume, that the full picture is there.
You don’t perceive objects as they are. You perceive them as you are.
About a third of the human brain is dedicated to the mission of vision,
Vision isn’t about photons that can be readily interpreted by the visual cortex. Instead it’s a whole body experience.
To synchronize the incoming information from the senses, the cost is that our conscious awareness lags behind the physical world. That’s the unbridgeable gap between an event occurring and your conscious experience of it.
Instead of using your senses to constantly rebuild your reality from scratch every moment, you’re comparing sensory information with a model that the brain has already constructed: updating it, refining it, correcting it.
Twenty percent of the calories we consume are used to power the brain. So brains try to operate in the most energy-efficient way possible, and that means processing only the minimum amount of information from our senses that we need to navigate the world.
Some philosophers suggest that conscious awareness is nothing but lots of fast memory querying: our brains are always asking “What just happened? What just happened?”. Thus, conscious experience is really just immediate memory.
the conscious you is only the smallest part of the activity of your brain. Your actions, your beliefs and your biases are all driven by networks in your brain to which you have no conscious access.
Most of the time you are not aware of the decisions being made on your behalf.
Even when decisions seem spontaneous, they don’t exist in isolation.
our lives are steered by forces far beyond our capacity for awareness or control.
But our brains are always crushing ambiguity into choices.
Time travel is something the human brain does relentlessly. When faced with a decision, our brains simulate different outcomes to generate a mockup of what our future might be. Mentally, we can disconnect from the present moment and voyage to a world that doesn’t yet exist.
The key to the Ulysses contract is recognizing that we are different people in different contexts. To make better decisions, it’s important not only to know yourself but all of your selves.
Because self-control requires energy, which means we have less energy available for the next thing we need to do. And that’s why resisting temptation, making hard decisions, or taking initiative all seem to draw from the same well of energy. So willpower isn’t something that we just exercise – it’s something we deplete.
The US has more people in prison for drug-related crimes than the European Union has prisoners.
Our neurons require other people’s neurons to thrive and survive.
Heider and Simmel used this animation to demonstrate how readily we perceive social intention all around us. Moving shapes hit our eyes, but we see meaning and motives and emotion, all in the form of a social narrative. We can’t help but impose stories.
On average, those with Botox were worse at identifying the emotions in the pictures correctly.
We all know that the less mobile faces of Botox users can make it hard to tell what they’re feeling; the surprise is that those same frozen muscles can make it hard for them to read others.
In other words, watching someone else in pain and being in pain use the same neural machinery. This is the basis of empathy.
Are our brains dependent on social interaction? What would happen if the brain were starved of human contact?
The result is especially remarkable given that these were simply one-word labels: it takes very little to establish group membership. A basic categorization is enough to change your brain’s preconscious response to another person in pain.
As we move into the future, we will increasingly design our own sensory portals on the world. We will wire ourselves into an expanded sensory reality.
