7 reasons not to trust your brain

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Find out why we are never objective and what are the root causes of many of our actions.

The possibilities of the brain are enormous, but most of them remain a mystery to us. Our consciousness is like the tip of the iceberg, and the rest, the subconscious part, is hidden under water. And getting there is extremely difficult, if not impossible. David Eagleman in his book Incognito. The Secret Life of the Mind”named several reasons why we should not trust our brain.

1. Most of our actions, thoughts and feelings are not under our conscious control

The human brain is a very complex device. Huge interweaving of neurons - a real jungle - work in accordance with their programs. We know we have to wake up early in the morning to get to work. Wash up, have breakfast, get dressed and take time to travel.

But this conscious activity is only a tiny patch of what's actually going on in our brains. He, according to Eagleman, lives by his own laws, and we are pretty much dependent on him, but we do not command him. Not every decision or thought that comes to our minds appears there by our will.

In a recent experiment, men were asked to rate the attractiveness of female faces in different photographs. The photographs were of the same format and showed faces from the front or three-quarters. Unbeknownst to the men, in half of the photographs, the women’s eyes were wider and larger. And all the participants in the experiment unanimously recognized big-eyed women as the most attractive. They could not explain their preferences, nor could they notice the peculiarity of the eyes.

So who made this choice for them? Somewhere in the depths of a man's brain is stored information that a woman's wide open eyes speak of sexual arousal.

Those who participated in the study were unaware of this. They also did not know that their ideas about beauty and attractiveness are deeply and firmly connected with the programs of natural selection, formed by our brains over millions of years. When the subjects chose the most attractive women, they did not know that the choice was not made by them, but by the neurons of their brain, storing the experience of hundreds of thousands of generations.

2. The brain is responsible for collecting information and takes the steering against our will

For most of our life, consciousness is not involved in decision-making, no matter how much we want to believe in it. Rather, the degree of his involvement is very small, says Eagleman. Our brains work mostly on autopilot. And the conscious mind has almost no access to the subconscious - a powerful and mysterious structure, the possibilities of which have been so little studied so far.

This is especially often manifested during road traffic, when we have time to brake in time or sharply swerve to the side in order to avoid a collision with another car: our consciousness simply does not have enough time to analyze the situation.

Likewise, you find someone attractive, but you cannot explain to yourself why he or she is so good. Despite this, you are making a choice that is beyond logic. This does not mean that he is bad. It just means that you are not the one who makes the decision.

Each country has its own factories, factories, communication lines, large enterprises. Products are constantly shipped, electricity and sewerage are working, courts are functioning and deals are being made. Everyone is busy with their own business: teachers teach, athletes compete, drivers carry their passengers.

Perhaps someone wants to know what is happening in the country at a particular moment, but people are not able to take all the information at once. We need a short summary: not the details, but the essence. To do this, we buy a newspaper or look at the news bulletin on the Internet.

Our consciousness is a newspaper. The neurons of the brain work continuously, decisions are made every second, and we have no idea about many of them.

By the time a thought flashed through our minds, all the important actions in the brain had already taken place.

Consciousness sees the scene, but has no idea what is happening behind the scenes, what hectic work is in full swing there day and night. Sometimes it seems like an idea suddenly dawns on us. In fact, there is nothing sudden about this: the neurons of our brain have been processing it for a long time for several days, months or even years before giving you an idea in an easy-to-understand form. Many geniuses guessed about this.

3. In a sense, everything we see is an illusion

Visual illusions serve as a kind of window to the brain. The very word "illusion", says Eagleman, has a rather broad meaning, since everything that we see is somewhat illusory, like a view through a frosted glass shower door. Our central vision is directed towards what is in focus.

Eagleman invites the reader to conduct an experiment: take a few colored markers or pencils in his hand, look at them, and then turn his gaze to the tip of his nose and try to name the order of objects in his hand.

Even if you can determine the colors themselves with peripheral vision, you will not be able to accurately determine their order. Our peripheral vision is very weak as the brain uses the eye muscles to direct high-resolution central vision directly to what we are interested in at a particular moment.

Central vision gives us the illusion that the entire visual world is in focus, but in reality this is not at all the case. We are not aware of the limits of our field of vision.

This feature is well known not only to neurologists, but also to many magicians, magicians and illusionists. By directing our attention in the right direction, they can deftly manipulate it. They know that our brains only process small pieces of the visual scene, not everything that comes into view.

This explains the huge number of accidents in which drivers hit pedestrians right in front of their own noses, collide with other cars and even trains literally out of the blue. Their eyes look in the right direction, but the brain does not see the necessary details. Vision is more than just a look.

4. The brain does not need a complete model of the world, it just has to figure out on the fly where to look and when

If you are in a cafe, then, according to Eagleman, your brain should not encode all the details of the situation in the smallest detail. He only knows how and where to look for what is needed at the moment. Our internal model has an idea of who is on the left and right, where the wall is, and what is on the table.

If there is a sugar bowl and you are asked how many sugar cubes are left in it, your visual systems will learn the details and add new data to the internal model. Despite the fact that the sugar bowl was always in sight, the brain did not notice any details until it did additional work adding a few more points to the big picture.

In fact, we are practically not aware of anything until we ask ourselves about it.

Does the left foot feel comfortable in the new shoe? Is the air conditioner humming in the background?

We are unaware of the details until they grab our attention. Our perception of the world is inaccurate: we think that we see the complete picture, but in reality we only capture what we need to know, and nothing more.

5. The visual system is formed by different modules of the brain, independent of each other

The part of the brain called the visual cortex forms a complex system of cells and neural circuits. Some of them specialize in color, others in motion recognition and many different tasks. These chains are closely related. They send us impulses - something like newspaper headlines - says Eagleman. The headline indicates that there is a bus coming or that someone is trying to get our attention by flirting with us.

The vision can be broken down into separate parts. If we look at a waterfall for a few minutes, and then turn our gaze to stationary objects, such as rocks, we can see that they are crawling upward. Although we understand that they cannot move.

Typically, up-signaling neurons are balanced in association with down-signaling neurons. This imbalance in motion detectors makes it possible to see the impossible: motion without changing position.

Aristotle was also engaged in the study of the illusion at the waterfall. This example proves that vision is the product of various modules: some parts of the visual system insist (incorrectly) that rocks are moving, others that they are motionless.

6. Emotional and rational systems compete in the brain

The rational system is responsible for the analysis of external events, the emotional system - for the internal state. There is a continuous struggle between them.

This is well illustrated by Eagleman's philosophical trolley problem. An uncontrolled trolley rushes along the tracks. She is about to crash into a group of repairmen. But there is a switch nearby that will direct the minecart along a different path. The trouble is that there is also a worker there, but only one. What should you choose? Kill five people or one? Most people are willing to use the switch, because the death of one is still better than the death of five?

What if you don't need to flip a switch, but personally push a fat man off the bridge in order to stop the minecart or knock it out of the way? In this case, the majority refuse to throw the person off the bridge. But nothing has changed quantitatively: the same one sacrificed for the sake of five. However, there is a difference.

In the first case, with the switch, a very bad situation is reduced to a less bad one. In the case of the man on the bridge, he is used as a means to an end, and this causes outrage. There is another interpretation: in the case of a switch, there is no direct impact on a person, contact with him. Touch activates the emotional system, transforming an abstract task into a personal emotional solution.

Emotional and rational systems must be balanced, neither of them should prevail over the other.

The ancient Greeks had an analogy for the path of life: you are a charioteer driving a chariot with two horses: a white horse of wisdom and a black horse of passion. The horses pull each in their own direction, and the charioteer's task is to keep them under control so as not to lose control and move on.

7. Emotional and rational systems vie for our long-term and short-term desires

We all go through some kind of temptation, momentary pleasures that can turn into unpredictable consequences. The emotional system advises to succumb to temptation, the rational one tries to hold back. A virtuous person is not one who does not give in to temptation at all, but one who can resist him. There are few such people, because it is easy to obey impulses and very difficult to ignore them.

Even Freud noted that logical arguments are powerless in front of human passions and desires. In part, religion is able to cope with this when it fights emotional outbursts, appealing to feelings, and not to logic. But not all people are religious, and even believers are not always able to resist temptation.

Our behavior is the end result of a battle between two systems.

But this is not a battle to the death between two enemies, but rather an eternal dispute in which they are able to negotiate with each other. These are preliminary instructions made by a person in one state, providing that he may be in another.

So, to overcome alcohol addiction, a person trying to quit drinking takes care in advance that there is not a drop of alcohol in the house. Otherwise, the temptation will be too great. Thus, his rational system makes a deal with the emotional.