Intriguingly it shows how much of our existence is unconscious, far more than we believe.
We construct mental models of the world in order to make predictions about it and then compare the input from our senses (or just from running our internal model in thought experiments) to improve the model.
Loc. 290 Our brain consumes about 20% of our body’s energy even though the brain is only 2% of our body in terms of its weight.
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Loc. 492 But this long-term change in the brain had no effect on his conscious mind. He could not remember anything that happened yesterday. Such people show that our brain can know things about the world that our mind does not know.
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Loc. 502-4DF’s brain “knows” about the angle of the rod and can use this information to control the movements of her hand. But DF can’t use this information to see the orientation of the rod. Her brain knows something about the physical world, while her conscious mind does not.
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Loc. 708-12 Not only do we seem to perceive the world instantly and without effort, we also seem to perceive the whole visual scene in vivid detail. This too is an illusion. Only the middle of the visual scene that strikes the center of our eye can be seen in detail and in color. This is because only the middle of our retina (the fovea) has closely packed, color-sensitive neurons (cones). Beyond about 10 degrees from the middle the neurons are further apart and detect only light and shade (rods). The edge of our view of the world is blurred and has no color.
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Loc. 1059-62 The urge to lift the finger occurred about 200 msec before the finger was actually lifted. But the key observation that caused so much fuss was that the change in brain activity occurred about 500 msec before the finger was lifted. So brain activity indicating that the volunteer was about to lift a finger occurred about 300 msec before that volunteer reported having the urge to lift his or her finger.
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Loc. 1370-73 Pavlov reports that even after 374 combinations of a loud buzzer and food, no learning took place. This was because the sound of the buzzer always occurred 5 to 10 seconds after the food was put into the mouth. An arbitrary stimulus is only interesting if it predicts that something nice or nasty is going to happen in the future. If the stimulus comes after the important event, it is of no interest at all.
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Loc. 1468-73 The activity in these cells does not signal reward. It does not even signal that reward will be coming soon. The activity in these cells tells us that there is an error in our prediction about reward. If the juice arrives when we expect it to arrive, then there is no error in our prediction and the dopamine nerve cells do not send out a signal. If the juice arrives unexpectedly, then the reward is better then we expected and the nerve cells send out a positive signal. If the juice fails to arrive when it should, then the reward is worse than we expected and the nerve cells send out a negative signal. These signals about the errors of our predictions enable us to learn about the world without needing a teacher. If our prediction about the world is wrong, then this is a sign to us that we need to do something in order to make our prediction better.
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Loc. 1561-63 The volunteer’s brain now responded to this angry face as if it was a loud noise. But the volunteer himself was not aware of having seen the angry face, because it had been masked with another face. The volunteer was learning a conditioned response even though he was not aware of seeing the stimulus that elicited this conditioned response.91
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Loc. 2037-39 What I perceive are not the crude and ambiguous cues that impinge from the outside world onto my eyes and my ears and my fingers. I perceive something much richer - a picture that combines all these crude signals with a wealth of past experience.114 My perception is a prediction of what ought to be out there in the world. And this prediction is constantly tested by action.
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Loc. 2078-81 Our brains build models of the world and continuously modify these models on the basis of the signals that reach our senses. So, what we actually perceive are our brain’s models of the world. They are not the world itself, but, for us, they are as good as. You could say that our perceptions are fantasies that coincide with reality. Furthermore, if no sensory signals are available, then our brain fills in the missing information.
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Loc. 2129-31 The imagination is utterly uncreative. It has no predictions to make and no errors to resolve. We don’t create in our heads. We create by externalizing our thoughts with sketches and doodles and rough drafts so that we can benefit from the unexpectedness of reality. It is this continual unexpectedness that makes interacting with the real world such a joy.
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Loc. 2170-72 Even stick figures have a gender For a moving version try http://www.biomotionlab.ca/Demos/BMLgender.html from Prof Nikolaus Troje’s Biomotion lab.
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Loc. 2275-77 To imitate someone, we watch their movements closely, but we don’t copy these movements. We use the movements to discover something in the mind of the person we are watching: the goal of their movement. Then we imitate them by making a movement that achieves the same goal.
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Loc. 2362-64 These mental times and physical times are not the same. In your mind the button press occurs slightly later and the bell starts to ring slightly earlier. For you the cause and effect of your action seem closer together. In mental time the components of your actions are bound together.
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Loc. 2461-65 I think that I have direct contact with the physical world, but this is an illusion created by my brain. My brain creates models of the physical world by combining signals from my senses and prior expectations, and it is these models that I am aware of. I acquire my knowledge of the mental world - the minds of others - in the same way. However it may seem to me, my contact with the mental world is neither more nor less direct than my contact with the physical world. Using cues acquired from my senses and prior knowledge acquired from my experience, my brain creates models of the minds of others.
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Loc. 2719-20 We understand that people’s behavior is controlled by beliefs even if these beliefs are false. And we soon learn that we can control people’s behavior by giving them false beliefs. This is the dark side of communication.
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Loc. 2923-26 But when we punish free riders, we are not deliberately trying to increase cooperation or thinking about how the group will benefit in the long term. We get immediate satisfaction from punishing people who have behaved unfairly. We do not feel any empathy for the suffering of these undesirable people. We have learned to dislike them. Our brain even gives us pleasure from the punishment of free riders.
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