Incognito, the secret lives of the brain by David Eagleman

A very readable book outlining the advances in understanding mind and brains.  The essence is that the conscious part (the part we call me) is actually a very thin layer on top of our existence.  Almost all of what we do is unconscious, our conscious sense of self just rationalises what we have just done to make sense of it for future occasions.  The only time we really use our conscious self is when setting goal sor long-term plans, but even then we are driven by our unconscious experience and desires.

The fact that what we think we preceive, is actually a construction of our brains and is quite often not so strongly connected with pyhsical external reality.  The book does have some philosophical implications for freewill, mentions them but doesn't really answer the problems it raises.

The first thing we learn from studying our own circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control.Read more at location 84 •
Most of its operations are above the security clearance of the conscious mind. The I simply has no right of entry.Read more at location 87 •
Consciousness developed because it was advantageous, but advantageous only in limited amounts.Read more at location 113 •  You may wish to know what’s happening at any moment in your great nation, but you can’t possibly take in all the information at once. Nor would it be useful, even if you could. You want a summary.Read more at location 117 •
You gleefully say, “I just thought of something!”, when in fact your brain performed an enormous amount of work before your moment of genius struck.Read more at location 132 •
One does not need to be consciously aware to perform sophisticated motor acts. You can notice this when you begin to duck from a snapping tree branch before you are aware that it’s coming toward you, or when you’re already jumping up when you first become aware of the phone’s ring.Read more at location 169 •
try this demonstration: have a friend hold a handful of colored markers or highlighters out to his side. Keep your gaze fixed on his nose, and now try to name the order of the colors in his hand. The results are surprising: even if you’re able to report that there are some colors in your periphery, you won’t be able to accurately determine their order.Read more at location 391 •
The brain generally does not need to know most things; it merely knows how to go out and retrieve the data. It computes on a need-to-know basis.Read more at location 457 •
You’re not perceiving what’s out there. You’re perceiving whatever your brain tells you.Read more at location 522 •
From the natural laboratory of evolution comes a related phenomenon in humans. At least 15 percent of human females possess a genetic mutation that gives them an extra (fourth) type of color photoreceptor—and this allows them to discriminate between colors that look identical to the majority of us with a mere three types of color photoreceptors.36 Two color swatches that look identical to the majority of people would be clearly distinguishable to these ladies. (No one has yet determined what percentage of fashion arguments is caused by this mutation.)Read more at location 692 •
The bottom line is that time is a mental construction, not an accurate barometer of what’s happening “out there.” Here’s a way to prove to yourself that something strange is going on with time: look at your own eyes in a mirror and move your point of focus back and forth so that you’re looking at your right eye, then at your left eye, and back again. Your eyes take tens of milliseconds to move from one position to the other, but—here’s the mystery—you never see them move. What happens to the gaps in time while your eyes are moving? Why doesn’t your brain care about the small absences of visual input?Read more at location 829 •
consciousness tends to interfere with most tasks (remember the unhappy centipede in the ditch)—but it can be helpful when setting goals and training the robot. Evolutionary selection has presumably tuned the exact amount of access the conscious mind has: too little, and the company has no direction; too much, and the system gets bogged down solving problems in a slow, clunky, energy-inefficient manner.Read more at location 1175 •
Our conscious assessment of an activity as easy or natural can lead us to grossly underestimate the complexity of the circuits that make it possible. Easy things are hard: most of what we take for granted is neurally complex.Read more at location 1420 •
We live inside the umwelt of our instincts, and we typically have as little perception of them as the fish does of its water.Read more at location 1433 •
The chicken/shovel experiment led 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. This idea of retrospective storytelling suggests that we come to know our own attitudes and emotions, at least partially, by inferring them from observations of our own behavior.Read more at location 2166 •
Minds seek patterns. In a term introduced by science writer Michael Shermer, they are driven toward “patternicity”—the attempt to find structure in meaningless data.42 Evolution favors pattern seeking, because it allows the possibility of reducing mysteries to fast and efficient programs in the neural circuitry.Read more at location 2248 •
Human programmers approach a problem by assuming there’s a best way to solve it, or that there’s a way it should be solved by the robot. But the main lesson we can extract from biology is that it’s better to cultivate a team of populations that attack the problem in different, overlapping manners.Read more at location 2394 •
“Evolution is smarter than you are.” If I had a law of biology, it would be: “Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don’t stop.”Read more at location 2401 •
Libet’s experiments caused a commotion.15 Could it be true that the conscious mind is the last one in the chain of command to receive any information? Did his experiment drive the nail into the coffin of free will?Read more at location 2702 •
The heart of the problem is that it no longer makes sense to ask, “To what extent was it his biology and to what extent was it him?” The question no longer makes sense because we now understand those to be the same thing. There is no meaningful distinction between his biology and his decision making. They are inseparable.Read more at location 2842 •
main difference between teenage and adult brains is the development of the frontal lobes. The human prefrontal cortex does not fully develop until the early twenties, and this underlies the impulsive behavior of teenagers. The frontal lobes are sometimes called the organ of socialization, because becoming socialized is nothing but developing circuitry to squelch our basest impulses.Read more at location 2958 •
you choose neither your nature nor your nurture, much less their entangled interaction. You inherit a genetic blueprint and are born into a world over which you have no choice throughout your most formative years. This is the reason people come to the table with quite different ways of seeing the world, dissimilar personalities, and varied capacities for decision making. These are not choices; these are the dealt hands of cards.Read more at location 3478 •
As the quip goes: If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn’t be smart enough to understand them.Read more at location 3620 •