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Copyright © 2011 by David Eagleman

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Great britain by Canongate Books Ltd., Edinburgh.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Information

Eagleman, David.

Incognito : the hole-and-corner lives of the brain / David Eagleman.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and alphabetize.

eISBN: 978-0-307-37978-8

1. Subconsciousness. 2. Brain. I. Title.

BF315.E25 2011 153—dc22 2010053184

www.pantheonbooks.com

Jacket design by Peter Mendelsund

v3.1

Man is as incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

—Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Contents

Embrace

Other Books by This Writer

Championship Page

Copyright

Epigraph

i. There's Someone In My Caput, But It'south Not Me

two. The Testimony of the Senses: What Is Experience Really Like?

3. Mind: The Gap

4. The Kinds of Thoughts That Are Thinkable

v. The Encephalon Is a Team of Rivals

vi. Why Blameworthiness Is the Wrong Question

seven. Life After the Monarchy

Appendix

Acknowledgments

Nearly the Writer

Notes

Bibliography

Index

There'southward Someone in My Head, But It's Not Me

Take a close look at yourself in the mirror. Beneath your dashing expert looks churns a hidden universe of networked mechanism. The machinery includes a sophisticated scaffolding of interlocking bones, a netting of sinewy muscles, a adept deal of specialized fluid, and a collaboration of internal organs chugging away in darkness to go on you alive. A sheet of loftier-tech self-healing sensory material that we telephone call pare seamlessly covers your mechanism in a pleasing packet.

And then there's your encephalon. Three pounds of the most complex cloth we've discovered in the universe. This is the mission command eye that drives the whole operation, gathering dispatches through small portals in the armored bunker of the skull.

Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia—hundreds of billions of them. Each one of these cells is equally complicated as a urban center. And each one contains the entire human genome and traffics billions of molecules in intricate economies. Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your encephalon past a unmarried photon of calorie-free, the combined output would be blinding.

The cells are connected to i some other in a network of such staggering complexity that information technology bankrupts human language and necessitates new strains of mathematics. A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. Given the billions of neurons, this means there are every bit many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Galaxy galaxy.

The three-pound organ in your skull—with its pink consistency of Jell-o—is an alien kind of computational fabric. Information technology is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we've dreamt of edifice. So if you always feel lazy or dull, accept eye: you're the busiest, brightest thing on the planet.

Ours is an incredible story. As far as anyone can tell, we're the only organisation on the planet and then complex that nosotros've thrown ourselves headlong into the game of deciphering our ain programming language. Imagine that your desktop figurer began to control its ain peripheral devices, removed its ain cover, and pointed its webcam at its ain circuitry. That's u.s.a..

And what we've discovered by peering into the skull ranks among the nearly meaning intellectual developments of our species: the recognition that the innumerable facets of our beliefs, thoughts, and experience are inseparably yoked to a vast, wet, chemical-electrical network chosen the nervous system. The machinery is utterly conflicting to us, and yet, somehow, it is united states of america.

THE TREMENDOUS MAGIC

In 1949, Arthur Alberts traveled from his abode in Yonkers, New York, to villages between the Gold Declension and Timbuktu in West Africa. He brought his wife, a camera, a jeep, and—because of his love of music—a jeep-powered record recorder. Wanting to open the ears of the western world, he recorded some of the most important music ever to come out of Africa.i But Alberts ran into social troubles while using the tape recorder. 1 Westward African native heard his voice played back and defendant Alberts of "stealing his natural language." Alberts only narrowly averted being pummeled by taking out a mirror and disarming the man that his tongue was even so intact.

It'south non difficult to see why the natives found the tape recorder so counterintuitive. A voice seems ephemeral and ineffable: it is similar opening a purse of feathers which scatter on the cakewalk and can never exist retrieved. Voices are weightless and odorless, something you cannot hold in your hand.

So it comes every bit a surprise that a voice is physical. If you build a niggling machine sensitive enough to detect tiny compressions of the molecules in the air, y'all can capture these density changes and reproduce them later. Nosotros phone call these machines microphones, and every one of the billions of radios on the planet is proudly serving upwards numberless of feathers once thought irretrievable. When Alberts played the music back from the tape recorder, one West African tribesman depicted the feat as "tremendous magic."

And and then it goes with thoughts. What exactly is a thought? It doesn't seem to weigh anything. It feels ephemeral and ineffable. Y'all wouldn't recollect that a idea has a shape or smell or any sort of physical instantiation. Thoughts seem to be a kind of tremendous magic.

Just just like voices, thoughts are underpinned by concrete stuff. We know this because alterations to the brain change the kinds of thoughts we tin can think. In a state of deep sleep, there are no thoughts. When the brain transitions into dream sleep, there are unbidden, bizarre thoughts. During the twenty-four hour period we enjoy our normal, well-accustomed thoughts, which people enthusiastically attune by spiking the chemic cocktails of the encephalon with alcohol, narcotics, cigarettes, coffee, or physical exercise. The state of the physical material determines the state of the thoughts.

And the concrete material is absolutely necessary for normal thinking to tick forth. If you were to injure your pinkie in an accident yous'd be distressed, but your conscious experience would exist no unlike. By dissimilarity, if you were to impairment an equivalently sized piece of encephalon tissue, this might modify your capacity to understand music, proper name animals, come across colors, judge take chances, make decisions, read signals from your body, or understand the concept of a mirror—thereby unmasking the strange, veiled workings of the machinery beneath. Our hopes, dreams, aspirations, fears, comic instincts, cracking ideas, fetishes, senses of humour, and desires all emerge from this strange organ—and when the brain changes, then do nosotros. So although information technology's easy to intuit that thoughts don't have a physical basis, that they are something like feathers on the air current, they in fact depend direct on the integrity of the enigmatic, three-pound mission command center.

The beginning affair we learn from studying our own circuitry is a elementary lesson: near of what we do and recall and feel is not under

our conscious control. The vast jungles of neurons operate their own programs. The conscious you—the I that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning—is the smallest flake of what'south transpiring in your brain. Although nosotros are dependent on the functioning of the encephalon for our inner lives, it runs its ain show. Most of its operations are above the security clearance of the conscious mind. The I simply has no right of entry.

Your consciousness is similar a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journeying without acknowledging the massive engineering science underfoot. This volume is about that amazing fact: how nosotros know it, what it means, and what it explains about people, markets, secrets, strippers, retirement accounts, criminals, artists, Ulysses, drunkards, stroke victims, gamblers, athletes, bloodhounds, racists, lovers, and every decision you've ever taken to exist yours.

* * *

In a recent experiment, men were asked to rank how attractive they found photographs of different women'due south faces. The photos were eight by ten inches, and showed women facing the camera or turned in three-quarter profile. Unbeknownst to the men, in half the photos the eyes of the women were dilated, and in the other half they were not. The men were consistently more than attracted to the women with dilated eyes. Remarkably, the men had no insight into their determination making. None of them said, "I noticed her pupils were two millimeters larger in this photo than in this other one." Instead, they simply felt more than drawn toward some women than others, for reasons they couldn't quite put a finger on.

And then who was doing the choosing? In the largely inaccessible workings of the brain, something knew that a woman'southward dilated eyes correlates with sexual excitement and readiness. Their brains knew this, but the men in the report didn't—at least not explicitly. The men may also not have known that their notions of dazzler and feelings of attraction are securely hardwired, steered in the right management past programs carved past millions of years of natural selection. When the men were choosing the near attractive women, they didn't know that the selection was not theirs, really, only instead the choice of successful programs that had been burned deep into the brain'southward circuitry over the class of hundreds of thousands of generations.

Brains are in the business of gathering information and steering beliefs accordingly. It doesn't affair whether consciousness is involved in the decision making. And most of the time, it's non. Whether we're talking near dilated optics, jealousy, attraction, the dearest of fatty foods, or the great thought yous had last calendar week, consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain. Our brains run mostly on autopilot, and the conscious listen has petty access to the behemothic and mysterious factory that runs below it.

Yous run into evidence of this when your pes gets halfway to the restriction earlier y'all consciously realize that a red Toyota is backing out of a driveway on the road ahead of you. You run into it when you notice your proper noun spoken in a chat across the room that you idea you weren't listening to, when you lot find someone attractive without knowing why, or when your nervous organization gives yous a "hunch" about which choice you should make.

The brain is a complex system, but that doesn't mean it's incomprehensible. Our neural circuits were carved by natural option to solve issues that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary history. Your brain has been molded by evolutionary pressures only as your spleen and optics have been. Then has your consciousness. Consciousness developed because it was advantageous, simply advantageous only in express amounts.

Consider the activeness that characterizes a nation at any moment. Factories churn, telecommunication lines buzz with activity, businesses ship products. People eat constantly. Sewer lines direct waste. All across the dandy stretches of land, police chase criminals. Handshakes secure deals. Lovers rendezvous. Secretaries field calls, teachers profess, athletes compete, doctors operate, bus drivers navigate. Yous may wish to know what'southward happening at any moment in your nifty nation, but you can't perchance have in all the information at once. Nor would it be useful, fifty-fifty if you could. You want a summary. Then you choice up a newspaper—not a dumbo paper like the New York Times but lighter fare such equally USA Today. Yous won't be surprised that none of the details of the activity are listed in the paper; after all, you desire to know the bottom line. Yous want to know that Congress just signed a new taxation police that affects your family unit, simply the detailed origin of the idea—involving lawyers and corporations and filibusters—isn't peculiarly of import to that new bottom line. And you lot certainly wouldn't want to know all the details of the nutrient supply of the nation—how the cows are eating and how many are being eaten—yous but want to be alerted if at that place'due south a fasten of mad cow disease. You don't care how the garbage is produced and packed away; y'all only care if it'southward going to terminate up in your backyard. You don't intendance nearly the wiring and infrastructure of the factories; you lot just care if the workers are going on strike. That's what you become from reading the newspaper.

Your conscious mind is that newspaper. Your brain buzzes with action around the clock, and, just like the nation, almost everything transpires locally: small groups are constantly making decisions and sending out letters to other groups. Out of these local interactions emerge larger coalitions. Past the fourth dimension you read a mental headline, the important activeness has already transpired, the deals are done. You have surprisingly picayune access to what happened behind the scenes. Unabridged political movements gain ground-up support and go unstoppable before you ever catch wind of them every bit a feeling or an intuition or a idea that strikes you lot. Yous're the concluding one to hear the information.

However, yous're an odd kind of newspaper reader, reading the headline and taking credit for the idea as though y'all thought of information technology first. You gleefully say, "I just thought of something!", when in fact your encephalon performed an enormous corporeality of work earlier your moment of genius struck. When an thought is served upwards from behind the scenes, your neural circuitry has been working on it for hours or days or years, consolidating data and trying out new combinations. But you accept credit without farther wonderment at the vast, subconscious mechanism behind the scenes.

And who can arraign yous for thinking you deserve the credit? The brain works its machinations in secret, conjuring ideas like tremendous magic. It does not allow its colossal operating system to be probed by conscious knowledge. The encephalon runs its show incognito.

So who, exactly, deserves the acclamation for a great idea? In 1862, the Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell developed a gear up of central equations that unified electricity and magnetism. On his deathbed, he coughed up a strange sort of confession, declaring that "something inside him" discovered the famous equations, not he. He admitted he had no idea how ideas actually came to him—they simply came to him. William Blake related a similar experience, reporting of his long narrative poem Milton: "I accept written this poem from firsthand dictation twelve or sometimes twenty lines at a time without premeditation and fifty-fifty confronting my will." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe claimed to have written his novella The Sorrows of Immature Werther with practically no witting input, as though he were holding a pen that moved on its ain.

And consider the British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He began using opium in 1796, originally for relief from the pain of toothaches and facial neuralgia—merely before long he was irreversibly hooked, swigging as much as two quarts of laudanum each week. His poem "Kubla Khan," with its exotic and dreamy imagery, was written on an opium high that he described as "a kind of a reverie." For him, the opium became a style to tap into his hidden neural circuits. We credit the beautiful words of "Kubla Khan" to Coleridge because they came from his brain and no else's, right? Just he couldn't get concur of those words while sober, so who exactly does the credit for the poem belong to?

As Carl Jung put it, "In each of us there is another whom we do not know." Every bit Pink Floyd put it, "There'southward someone in my head, but it's non me."

* * *

Near the entirety of what happens in your mental life is not nether your conscious control, and the truth is that it'southward b

etter this way. Consciousness can take all the credit information technology wants, simply it is best left at the sidelines for most of the conclusion making that cranks along in your brain. When it meddles in details it doesn't understand, the performance runs less effectively. Once you lot begin deliberating virtually where your fingers are jumping on the pianoforte keyboard, you can no longer pull off the piece.

To demonstrate the interference of consciousness as a political party fox, paw a friend two dry erase markers—one in each mitt—and ask her to sign her proper noun with her right mitt at the same fourth dimension that she's signing information technology backward (mirror reversed) with her left hand. She will speedily detect that at that place is only one way she tin can do it: by non thinking about it. Past excluding witting interference, her hands can practise the circuitous mirror movements with no trouble—but if she thinks about her actions, the chore gets quickly tangled in a bramble of stuttering strokes.

So consciousness is best left uninvited from most of the parties. When it does get included, it's usually the last one to hear the information. Have hitting a baseball. On August 20, 1974, in a game between the California Angels and the Detroit Tigers, the Guinness Book of Globe Records clocked Nolan Ryan'due south fastball at 100.ix miles per hour (44.7 meters per 2nd). If you lot piece of work the numbers, you'll meet that Ryan'south pitch departs the mound and crosses home plate, sixty-feet, half-dozen inches away, in four-tenths of a second. This gives just enough time for light signals from the baseball to striking the batter'due south eye, work through the circuitry of the retina, activate successions of cells along the loopy superhighways of the visual organization at the back of the head, cross vast territories to the motor areas, and change the contraction of the muscles swinging the bat. Amazingly, this entire sequence is possible in less than four-tenths of a 2d; otherwise no 1 would e'er hitting a fastball. But the surprising part is that conscious sensation takes longer than that: about half a second, as we volition come across in Chapter 2. Then the ball travels too rapidly for batters to be consciously aware of information technology. Ane does non demand to be consciously enlightened to perform sophisticated motor acts. You lot can notice this when you begin to duck from a snapping tree branch before you are aware that information technology's coming toward you, or when you're already jumping upwardly when you first go aware of the telephone'due south ring.

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