Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman (PDF)

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If the conscious mind—the part you consider to be you—is just the tip of the iceberg, what is the rest doing? In this sparkling and provocative new book, the renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman navigates the depths of the subconscious brain to illuminate surprising mysteries: Why can your foot move halfway to the brake pedal before you become consciously aware of danger ahead? Why do you hear your name being mentioned in a conversation that you didn’t think you were listening to? What do Ulysses and the credit crunch have in common? Why did Thomas Edison electrocute an elephant in 1916? Why are people whose names begin with J more likely to marry other people whose names begin with J? Why is it so difficult to keep a secret? And how is it possible to get angry at yourself—who, exactly, is mad at whom? Taking in brain damage, plane spotting, dating, drugs, beauty, infidelity, synesthesia, criminal law, artificial intelligence, and visual illusions, Incognito is a thrilling subsurface exploration of the mind and all its contradictions.

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⭐IntroductionThe success and popularity of David Eagleman’s newest book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain is no secret. This humorous yet stimulating book explores the exciting world of our unconscious mind and all its contradictions. Eagleman is a prominent neuroscientist and director of the Laboratory for Perception and Action at Baylor College of Medicine, where he also directs the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. Eagleman is best known for his publications on time perception, synesthesia, and neuroscience law.Book SummaryIncognito can be divided into two main parts. The first half of the novel focuses on the workings of our unconscious brain. One of the most important points that Eagleman emphasizes throughout the entire novel is that the majority of our thoughts and behaviors are the result of unconscious processes that are either inaccessible to our conscious mind or function more efficiently when our conscious mind does not interfere. These unconscious processes are largely the result of evolution, learned experiences, genetics, and the influences of our environment.Our unconscious mind also plays a huge role in our perception of reality. Our perception of reality is often an illusion because we see with our brain and not our eyes. This means that we see only because our brain is able to interpret the information about the light waves detected by our eyes. Our unconscious brain modifies our perception of reality based on past experiences and often fills in missing information.The role of the conscious mind is to learn how to solve new problems. Through practice the conscious mind teaches the unconscious brain how to solve the problem so well that it rewires the brain; as a result, that solution or behavior is more efficiently produced by the unconscious mind. The conscious mind controls our unconscious subprograms by distributing control and resources and allowing communication between different areas of the brain. Our conscious mind is active when the something goes wrong with these subprograms or events violate our expectations. It also serves as a mediator between many of the rival teams that make up our unconscious including the left versus right hemisphere and the rational versus emotional systems. While the role of the conscious mind is an important one, its role seems small in comparison to all the behaviors our unconscious brain is responsible for.In the second half of Incognito, Eagleman explains the implications of the revelations about the unconscious that were the focus of previous chapters. The main implication according to Eagleman is that what we have learned about the unconscious brain conflicts with the way our justice system judges and sentences criminals. Currently, our legal system is based on the assumption that as humans we have free will and thus, are fully responsible for our actions. We are judged based on this assumption; unless it is proven that something impaired our mind’s control over our body while performing the criminal action. This presents a problem when we consider the way our brain works. Since, the majority of our thoughts and behaviors are the result of unconscious processes in the brain; this leaves very little room, if any, for the concept of free will. Additionally, not all brains are created equal because we cannot choose our genetics or the environment where we are raised, both of which are involved in shaping our unconscious brain.Eagleman argues that the question of free will should not matter in legal sentencing because research has shown that we are not as in control of our actions as we would like to think. He further argues the question of blameworthiness–the extent to which the criminal is to blame and the extent to which his biology is to blame–no longer makes sense either. This is because scientists now realize there is no distinction between our biology and decision-making. Additionally, as technology improves and we become better able to detect how behavior is caused by the microscopic details of our brain, more and more lawyers and criminals will appeal to the defense of biological mitigators, and more criminals will be judged not blameworthy. Consequently, the defense that the criminal’s actions were due to biological processes over which the criminal had no control is no longer valid. It is safe to assume that all criminals have something anomalous about their brain even though our current technology is not always sophisticated enough to detect anything.The solution Eagleman proposes is not to stop punishing criminals, but to change the way we punish them. He supports personalized sentences based on the likelihood of re-offense with those more likely of re-offense serving longer sentences. He further argues more emphasis should be on rehabilitation. Eagleman explains a new rehabilitation strategy called the prefrontal workout. The goal is to improve impulse control and through practice strengthen the neural circuits involved in long-term decision-making. Eagleman states that criminals should only be punished when their behavior is capable of being changed, or modified. If their behavior is not capable of being changed, then they should not be punished, but instead be taken into the care of the government. Overall, Eagleman suggests a legal system based our knowledge of the neural system that focuses on rehabilitation rather than punishment.Eagleman concludes by stating that while the revelation that our conscious mind is not at the center of who we are may seem like a dethronement of ourselves, this is not a something to be viewed negatively. Dethronement opens up the possibility of new discoveries, a better understanding of mankind and ourselves as individuals, as well as improved social policy.EvaluationI would strongly recommend Incognito to anyone who is interested in neuroscience, both novices and experts. While I have only started studying neuroscience this year, I was familiar with a fair amount of the topics discussed in Incognito such as how easily our perception can be tricked. At the same time, I learned about a great deal of interesting things that were new to me. For example, I had no idea about the extent to which our brains will go to provide a coherent narrative or seek patterns and explanations where none exist.The information presented is strongly grounded in massive amounts of neuroscience research that when synthesized provide an excellent overview of numerous aspects and views regarding the unconscious. It contains a great wealth of useful, innovative, and surprising information that is creatively presented in an easy to understand manner while still retaining its accuracy and thought provoking quality. Eagleman achieves this difficult feat of balancing simplicity with validity by using a variety of unique comparisons to our everyday world. Most importantly his style of writing is interactive and actively engages the reader by providing quick easy ways for the reader to experience firsthand what he is discussing while simultaneously demonstrating the truth of his claims.Eagleman proposes alterations to our legal system that are more compatible with our new understanding of the unconscious. While I agree with Eagleman’s proposed shift of focus from punishment to rehabilitation, he fails to fully explain the specifics regarding how we would actually go about implementing these changes. For example, while Eagleman makes it clear that free will and blameworthiness should not matter, he is not clear whether anything other than evidence and the jury’s determination of whether the accused committed the act should matter.Nor, does Eagleman clearly explain how we should or even could go about gaining popular approval from the people of America. He simply acknowledges that while it will be hard to make the shift from retribution to rehabilitation, that as a society we have been capable of changing social policy based on better understanding in the past. He compares his proposed to changes to the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. This comparison belittles the struggle and hard won victory of the African American people, while inflating the severity of the perceived problem with the setup of the legal system. I believe this is one of the poorest comparisons he could have made and it is most definitely the worst comparison in the entire book.Additionally, the practicality of Eagleman’s proposed prefrontal workout is limited. First, the prefrontal workout is still in the early stages of research. It is not known how effective it is on improving impulse control or if it is effective for a wide range of people. Second, the technology required for the prefrontal workout is very expensive because it requires the use of real time feedback brain imaging. Many prisons will not be able to afford to buy such expensive brain imaging machines with their budgets. Also, this rehabilitation strategy would require prisons to be able to hire personnel who are trained to use brain imaging as well as properly lead the rehabilitation. The prefrontal workout as rehabilitation for criminal is not practical and would probably be better suited to the setting of a behavior health hospital.There is a significant disconnect between Eagleman’s fascinating, humorous, and well explained exploration of the functions of the unconscious mind in the first half of Incognito and his well-meaning, but poorly proposed alterations to the legal system. In spite of Eagleman’s failure to explain how we would go about implementing his proposed alterations to the justice system, he does thoroughly explain and support his reasons for believing such changes are necessary. Overall, the first part of the book which explored the role of the unconscious mind was better explained, supported, and just more enjoyable in general than Eagleman’s proposal to make the legal system more compatible with neuroscience.Even with Eagleman’s inadequate proposal in mind, I still urge anyone interested in neuroscience or psychology to read Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. The brilliance of the first half of the book far outweighs the shortcomings of the second half. Incognito is the perfect balance of wit and intellect. You will be shocked and amazed when you learn how much your unconscious brain does without your knowledge.ConclusionI strongly believe even those who consider themselves experts in neuroscience will learn a thing or two from Incognito, especially since it talks about some of the most current research being done. Furthermore, the range of topics covered is so vast that it is hard to imagine anyone could already know everything mentioned. But, even if there is someone who knows it all, I still recommend reading Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain because David Eagleman relates neuroscience to some of very strange and humorous questions. After all who doesn’t want to know: How is it possible to get mad at yourself? Or why Topsy the elephant was electrocuted by Tomas Edison in 1916?

⭐This excellent book is an outlier among brain books. Eagleman is able to create a bright narrative on how the brain works and the early chapters are fascinating.”The more surprising aspect of this framework is that the internal data is not generated by external sensory data but merely modulated by it. In 1911, Scottish mountaineer and neurophysiologist Thomas Graham Brown showed that the program for moving the muscles for walking is built into the machinery of the spinal cord. He severed the sensory nerves from a cat’s legs and demonstrated that the cat could walk on a treadmill perfectly well. This indicated that the program for walking was internally generated in the spinal cord and that sensory feedback from the legs was used only to modulate the program–when, say, the cat stepped on a slippery surface and needed to stay upright.”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 merely that the data coming in from the eyes anchors the perception. Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what’s in front of you.”However, this book faces the same problem faced by all modern brain researchers: we only understand so much of how the brain works. When Eagleman is detailing the structures and processes of the brain, he paints a compelling picture that organizes and clarifies well how things work. The brain, most of all is a prediction machine. When you receive inputs through your senses, the traces of those inputs are captured. Say, for the sake of explanation, you had a traumatic experience–you went camping in the rain and a snake crawled in the tent and bit you–and 30 aspects of that experience left behind traces. So, in the future, when you encounter, say, 21 of those same traces, then your mind is going to see that this current situation is quite similar and it signals. “Look for snake!” We say your brain is a prediction machine but all it’s doing is noticing things that have similarities to past experiences.”Throughout the brain there is as much feedback as feed-forward–a feature of brain wiring that is technically called recurrence and colloquially called loopiness. The whole system looks a lot more like a marketplace than an assembly line. To the careful observer, these features of the neurocircuitry immediately raise the possibility that visual perception is not just a procession of data crunching that begins from the eyes and ends with some mysterious end point at the back of the brain.”In fact, nested feedback connections are so extensive that the system can even run backward. That is, in contrast to the idea that the primary sensory areas merely process input into successively more complex interpretations for the next highest area of the brain, the higher areas are also talking directly back to the lower ones. For instance: shut your eyes and imagine an ant crawling on a red-and-white tablecloth toward a jar of purple jelly. The low-level parts of your visual system just lit up with activity. Even though you weren’t actually seeing the ant, you were seeing it in your mind’s eye. The higher-level areas were driving the lower ones. So although the eyes feed into these low-level brain areas, the interconnectedness of the system means these areas do just fine on their own in the dark.”Connecting these dots and the following ones is the primary achievement of this book. He gets us closer to understanding how this bag of meat between our ears actually works.”So what is the advantage of a loopy brain? First, it permits an organism to transcend stimulus-response behavior, and instead confers the ability to make predictions ahead of actual sensory input….” When we see someone throw a ball, our brain predicts where the ball will be. “Our brains do not work solely from the latest sensory data, but instead construct predictions about where the ball is about to be.”This is a specific example of the broader concept of internal models of the outside world. The brain internally simulates what will happen if you were to perform some action under specific conditions. Internal models not only play a role in motor acts (such as catching a ball) but also underlie conscious perception.” The idea is that “perception works not by building up bits of captured data, but instead by matching expectations to incoming sensory data.”… The visual cortex is fundamentally a machine whose job is to generate a model of the world. The primary visual cortex constructs an internal model that allows it to anticipate the data streaming up from the retina. The cortex sends its predictions to the thalamus, which reports on the DIFFERENCE between what comes in through the eyes and what was already anticipated. The thalamus sends back to the cortex only that difference information–that is, the bit that wasn’t predicted away. This unpredicted information adjusts the internal model so there will be less of a mismatch in the future.”This is a great book, full of illustrative examples and is only limited by the state of current neurology. Highly recommended.

⭐Popular science books often come in waves and at the moment we’re drowning in biologically inspired ‘ness’ books. We’ve got books on happiness, cooperativeness, pleasurableness (okay, I had to force that one), loneliness, competitiveness, and for all I know Loch Ness. When I see another one looming on the review shelf I tend to groan and reach for that DIY brain chemistry modifier, a pain killer. So when I saw Incognito looming there I was gritting my teeth for yet another dose of the same… but I couldn’t have been more wrong.It all starts with the UK cover, which has a lovely bit of op art in the squirly bit (not really obvious in the reduced version here), but the book was a dream to read. It explores how much of our actions are out of the control of our conscious mind and takes us through the wonders that are the various half-understood and often competing systems that handle the many aspects of thought and our interaction with our senses body as a whole.The first few chapters are packed with absolutely fascinating little examples (some of them practical things you can try yourself) that demonstrate just how much disconnection there is between our relatively puny consciousness and everything else the brain does. David Eagleman describes what’s going on in there as a bit like a parliament, rather than a dictatorship of the conscious mind. There is then a really thought provoking chapter on the crime and punishment. If, as Eagleman suggests seems likely, all actions can be linked to states of the brain rather than an individual’s choice, where does that leave our attitude to offenders? Eagleman argues we shouldn’t punish them, but some we can rehabilitate through specific mental processes, while others will have to be locked away for everyone’s protection because there is no way to change things.Of course, the book isn’t perfect. The introduction has some rather loose information in an attempt to make sweeping, involving statements. We are told that the visible universe is 15 billion light years across – probably a factor of 5 out. Eagleman suggests that Galileo’s near-contemporary Bruno was burned at the stake for rejecting an Earth-centered universe – which he wasn’t. (He was burned at the stake, but for heretical religious views, not his science.) And there’s a dramatic error in an attempt to show how our brains mishandle logic. Of themselves these aren’t huge errors, but it’s difficult not to think ‘If there are these mistakes in the bits I know about, what could be wrong in the stuff about brains that comes as a great surprise to me?’ My suspicion is that Eagleman knows his stuff, though – and he tells a great story.One good mark of the effectiveness of this book was that I couldn’t resist telling people about a couple of things I read here. One was that a percentage of women have a fourth colour receptor in their eyes, so would see colours and colour matches differently. Lovely factoid. The other you’ll have to spot when you read it. All in all this was a hugely enjoyable book, and despite sometimes seeming like a TV science show in its focus on style, it really delivers on information we’re all interested in about our favourite topic – ourselves. Recommended.

⭐I read ‘incognito’ published in 2011,after reading ‘the brain, the story of you’, which was published in 2015, so I guess the author may have redeemed himself in his later work. I found his arguments about our lack of free will disappointing especially when he cites cases of crimes committed in the presence of brain pathology to advance his argument. A verdict of not criminally responsible NCR or not guilty for reason of insanity NGRI can be given to the man who killed his wife and mother before shooting other strangers and then killing himself. The fact that he was found to have a brain tumour at autopsy ( which he clearly requested for in his suicide note to find the cause of his personality changes) completely exonerates him from blame. Automatism is another well recognised reason for an NCR or NGRI verdict and this does not mean that we don’t have free will in the absence of brain disease. The author delved into reductionist theories often championed by neuroscientists who are not actually clinicians and therefore do not have the privilege of knowing the patient’s psychological and social predisposing and perpetuating factors. Neuroscientists have suddenly left their field of biology to delve into psychology and sociology while dancing to the gallery in a bid to impress patients about their knowledge of the brain. The problem is that the brain doesn’t constitute the entire person just like your laptop computer does not explain the complexity of the internet and the World Wide Web. David Eagleman eventually concluded the book by accepting the limitations of neurobiology alone to explain the whole individual. The book is worth reading but a lot of his ideas have been overtaken by new developments in psychiatry and neurobiology.

⭐This is a really interesting and informative book about the latest research into the workings of the brain. It is slightly disconcerting to find that we are not as ‘in charge’ of ourselves as we think we are but, on the other hand we don’t have to worry as much as we do, as turning it over to the brain to sort out whilst we are consciously thinking of other things, is a definite plus. I think we will all have had the experience of waking up to find a decision we couldn’t make is now made, usually with a feeling of relief attached to it. (I keep hoping it will work with the EU referendum decision but it probably has too much information to sift through!) I was pleased to see affirmation that we can recognize people we have seen fairly briefly by movements or habits that the brain has stored and comes back in almost a ‘deja vu’ way. I had this experience recently and if I had known there was independent corroboration of this fact, I could have called the police without worrying that they would think I was paranoid. I have found that I am able to recognize several traits that I am now likely to see as prejudice in myself and try to make more independent assessments of individual people rather than judgements. It is quite freeing. I knew this before but I let it slide at times and now I don’t.

⭐Amazing book. It reveals so much about how the brain works, and it changes your understanding of why people behave the way they do.If you want to become a more forgiving person, or you just want to understand more about what your brain does, then read this book. The style is easy and the content is not academic or scientific, so it is accessible to everyone.

⭐A most stimulating discussion of neuroscience, this book seeks to answer, amongst other things, whether there is any such thing as free will. It describes how different parts of the brain work together – and often how they appear to work against each other. Much of the book is taken up by a discussion of how the justice system should adapt to our new understanding of brain function. While this is both interesting and important, I was hoping that there would be some discussion of other implications such as how this should influence our approach to learning to draw or speak another language. It is also quite repetitive.

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