Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out.
Our perception of reality has less to do with what’s happening out there, and more to do with what’s happening inside our brain. Your.
We’re now getting the first glimpses of the vastness of inner space. This internal, hidden, intimate cosmos commands its own goals, imperatives, and logic.
You might assume that you end at the border of your skin, but there’s a sense in which there’s no way to mark the end of you and the beginning of all those around you.
When people consider the trolley problem, here’s what brain imaging reveals: In the footbridge scenario, areas involved in motor planning and emotion become active. In contrast, in the track-switch scenario, only lateral areas involved in rational thinking become active. People register emotionally when they have to push someone; when they only have to tip a lever, their brain behaves like Star Trek’s Mr. Spock.
Imagine that your desktop computer began to control its own peripheral devices, removed its own cover, and pointed its webcam at its own circuitry. That’s us.
The human brain doesn’t passively take in experience like a recorder; instead, it constantly works over the sensory data it receives – and the fruit of that mental labor is new versions of the world.
Remove the world and the show still goes on.
Political persuasion emerges at the intersection of the mental and the corporal. Traveling.
There is never a time zero when you decide to do something, because every neuron in the brain is driven by other neurons; there seems to be no part of the system that acts independently rather than reacts dependably.
So modern neuroimaging is like asking an astronaut in the space shuttle to look out the window and judge how America is doing.
After all, that’s what memory is for: keeping track of important events, so that if you’re ever in a similar situation, your brain has more information to try to survive. In other words, when things are life-threateningly scary, it’s a good time to take notes.
In 2001, families and caretakers of Parkinson’s patients began to notice something strange. When patients were given a drug called pramipexole, some of them turned into gamblers.8 And not just casual gamblers – pathological gamblers. These.
While many animals are properly called intelligent, humans distinguish themselves in that they are so flexibly intelligent, fashioning their neural circuits to match the tasks at hand.
But it turns out that dopamine is a chemical on double duty in the brain. Along with its role in motor commands, it also serves as the main messenger in the reward systems, guiding a person toward food, drink, mates, and all things useful for survival. Because of its role in the reward system, imbalances in dopamine can trigger gambling, overeating, and drug addiction – behaviors that result from a reward system gone awry.
It’s not simply that you are attracted to humans over frogs or that you like apples more than fecal matter – these same principles of hardwired thought guidance apply to all of your deeply held beliefs about logic, economics, ethics, emotions, beauty, social interactions, love, and the rest of your vast mental landscape.
Some men may be genetically inclined to have and hold a single partner, while some may not. In the near future, young women who stay current with the scientific literature may demand genetic tests of their boyfriends to assess how likely they are to make faithful husbands.
Your consciousness is like a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot.
Many people prefer a view of human nature that includes a true side and a false side – in other words, humans have a single genuine aim and the rest is decoration, evasion, or cover-up. That’s intuitive, but it’s incomplete. A study of the brain necessitates a more nuanced view of human nature.
Only a couple of decades ago it was thought that brain development was mostly complete by the end of childhood. But we now know that the process of building a human brain takes up to twenty-five years.