Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain Quotes

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Societies would _not_ be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance - a teaming up of the internal rivals - is optimal for brains. ... Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, an...

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

If an epileptic seizure is focused in a particular sweet spot in the temporal lobe, a person won´t have motor seizures, but instead something more subtle. The effect is something like a cognitive seizure, marked by changes of personality, hyperrelig...

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

You´re not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

The deep secret of the brain is that not only the spinal cord but the entire central nervous system works this way: internally generated activity is modulated by sensory input. In this view, the difference between being awake and being asleep is mere...

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

.. we are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don't stop.

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

As Gazzaniga put it, "these findings all suggest that the interpretive mechanism of the left hemisphere is always hard at work, seeking the meaning of events. It is constantly looking for order and reasons, even when there is none - which leads it co...

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billio...

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain