The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head is Really Up To

by Dean Burnett

One of the brain’s more prominent skills is the ability to ignore anything that becomes too predictable, no matter how important it may be (this is why soldiers can still get some sleep in war zones).

The highly active REM sleep stage has a number of possible roles. One of the main ones involves memory. One persistent theory is that during REM sleep the brain is reinforcing and organising and maintaining our memories. Old memories are connected to new memories; new memories are activated to help reinforce them and make them more accessible; very old memories are stimulated to make sure the connections to them aren’t lost entirely, and so on. This process takes place during sleep, possibly because there is no external information coming in to the brain to confuse or complicate matters. You never come across roads being resurfaced while cars are still going over them, and the same logic applies here.

The ongoing complex cellular processes of the brain produce a wide variety of by-products that need to be cleared away, and studies have shown that this occurs at a higher rate during sleep, so it could be that sleep for the brain is the equivalent of a restaurant closing down to clear up between lunchtime and evening openings; it’s just as busy, but doing different things.

The amygdala doesn’t do subtlety; it senses something might be amiss and initiates a red alert straight away, a response far faster than the more complex analysis in the cortex could ever hope to be. This is why a scary sensation, like a balloon popping unexpectedly, produces a fear response almost instantly, before you can process it enough to realise it’s harmless.

Conspiracy theorists tend to be secretive, paranoid and distrustful of recognised authorities, so if a scientist were to say to one, ‘Would you like to come to our secure facility and let us experiment on you? It may involve being confined in a metal tube so we can scan your brain’, the answer is unlikely to be yes. So all that’s included in this section is a reasonable set of theories and assumptions based on the data we currently have available. But then, I would say that, wouldn’t I?

‘If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.’

One of the most infuriating experiences possible is arguing with someone who’s convinced they’re right when you know full well that they’re wrong, and can prove they’re wrong with facts and logic, but still they won’t budge.

The phenomenon of less-intelligent people being more confident has an actual scientific name: the Dunning–Kruger effect. It is named for David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University, the researchers who first looked into the phenomenon, inspired by reports of a criminal who held up banks after covering his face with lemon juice, because lemon juice can be used as invisible ink, so he thought his face wouldn’t show up on camera.5 Just let that sink in for a moment.

Wondering which gene is responsible for a trait such as intelligence is like wondering which piano key is responsible for a symphony.

You may be familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI), one of the most popular personality-measuring tools in the world, worth millions of dollars. The trouble is, it is not supported or approved by the scientific community. It looks rigorous and sounds proper (it too relies on scales of traits, extrovert–introvert being the most well-known one), but it’s based on untested decades-old assumptions put together by enthusiastic amateurs, working from a single source.8 Nonetheless, at some point it was seized on by business types who wanted to manage employees in the most effective manner, and thus it became globally popular. It now has hundreds of thousands of proponents who swear by it. But then, so do horoscopes.

So should we let ourselves get angry or not? I’m not suggesting you go and row with colleagues or force them through the office shredder every time they irritate you, but be aware that anger isn’t always a bad thing. However, moderation is key. Angry people tend to have their needs addressed before people who make polite requests. This means you get people who realise that being angry benefits them, so they do it more often. The brain eventually associates constant anger with rewards, so encourages it further, and you end up with someone who gets angry at the slightest inconvenience just to get their own way, and then they inevitably become a celebrity chef.

Procrastination is motivation to do the wrong thing (I should know, I had to disconnect my wifi to finish this book).

It seems as if the second best way to motivate a person to do something is to leave it incomplete and restrict their options for resolving it. There is an even more effective way to motivate people, but that will be revealed in my next book.

Sigmund Freud theorised that laughter is caused by the release of ‘psychic energy’, or tension.

“But then again, Freud never had to play second house at Glasgow Empire on a Saturday when Rangers and Celtic had both lost!” Ken Dodd

In Oliver Sacks’s seminal 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,5 he describes a group of aphasia patients who cannot understand spoken language, who are watching a speech by the president and finding it hilarious, which is clearly not the intent. The explanation is that the patients, robbed of their understanding of words, have become adept at recognising non-verbal cues and signs that most people overlook, being distracted by the actual words. The president, to them, is constantly revealing that he is being dishonest via facial tics, body language, rhythm of speech, elaborate gestures and so on. These things, to an aphasia patient, are big red flags of dishonesty. When coming from the most powerful man in the world, it’s either laugh or cry.

They say ‘love hurts’, and, yes, yes it does. Paracetamol is even sometimes effective for ‘heartache’.

Edmund Burke famously said, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’ But it’s probably even easier for evil if good men are willing to pitch in and help.

One idea is that, in evolutionary terms, a tendency to obey unthinkingly is more efficient; stopping to fight about who’s in charge every time a decision needs to be made is very impractical, so we’re left with a tendency to obey authority despite any reservations. It’s no great stretch to imagine corrupt but charismatic leaders exploiting this.

What have we learned so far about the human brain? It messes about with memories, it jumps at shadows, it’s terrified of harmless things, it screws with our diet, our sleeping, our movement, it convinces us we’re brilliant when we’re not, it makes up half the stuff we perceive, it gets us to do irrational things when emotional, it causes us to make friends incredibly quickly and turn on them in an instant. A worrying list. What’s even more worrying, it does all of this when it’s working properly.

Sadly, the truth is that many persist in thinking it’s easy to ignore or override a powerful debilitating mood disorder that regularly affects sufferers to the very core of their being. It’s an excellent demonstration of how the brain values consistency, that once a person is decided on a certain viewpoint, it’s hard to alter it. The people demanding that those with depression alter their thinking while refusing to do the same in the face of the evidence are showing just how hard it is. It’s a terrible shame that those who are suffering the most get made to feel worse because of it.

A word of caution: this section has focused on hallucinations and delusions being caused by disruptions and problems with the brain’s processes, which does suggest that they’re due only to disorders or illnesses. This isn’t the case. You may think someone is ‘deluded’ if they believe the earth is only six thousand years old and dinosaurs never existed, but millions of people genuinely believe this. Similarly, some people genuinely believe their deceased relatives are talking to them. Are they sick? Grieving? Is this a coping mechanism? A spiritual thing? There are many possible explanations other than ‘poor mental health’.

Afterword So that’s the brain. Impressive, isn’t it? But, also, a bit stupid.