Saturday, May 30, 2020

Incognito by David Eagleman

     "Our brains run mostly on autopilot, and the conscious mind has little access to the giant and mysterious factory that runs below it." Your brain doesn't encode everything. Your internal model omits stuff that doesn't seem relevant. Given a little information your brain uses its best guess to turn it into something larger.
     Outfielders move in such a way that the parabolic path of the ball always progresses in a straight line from their point of view. That's why they crash into walls. Our brains predict where the ball will be. Vision has to be learned. Blind people can learn to sense vision on their skin. The brain learns this way too. 
     The program for moving the muscles for walking is built into the machinery of the spinal cord. The entire central nervous system works this way. Hallucinations are simply unfastened vision. We can think of a scene and the low-level vision areas light up. 
     Perception works by matching expectations to current sensory data. The visual cortex constructs an internal model that allows it to anticipate the data streaming from the retina. The thalamus reports on the difference between what comes in from the eyes and what was anticipated. The thalamus sends only what wasn't predicted so the model can be refined. Awareness of your surroundings occurs only when sensory inputs violate expectations. 
     Time is a mental construction. The brain adjusts for different physical times say for sound and light or touch. 
     Plane spotters or chicken sexers have to be trained by example (like neural nets).
     We get the sense of things before we consciously make the connection. 
     Deliciousness is an index of usefulness. We identify what we can experience sensually as the entire objective reality. If you are blind you accept that reality. We accept our limited sense of smell.
     Cards 5 purple 8 red vs tequila 33 sprite 16 show social thinking easier than abstract. 
     The brain is a team of rivals. Approach-avoidance, two conflicting desires. For weight-loss provide a system to compete with the dire for food that has an incentive to make it competitive.
     Rational cognition involves external events, while emotion involves your internal state. Cognitive reserve-- overlapping solutions. 
     Minds see patterns. Consciousness exists to control-and to distribute control over-the automated alien systems. An index is the capacity to successfully mediate conflicting zombie systems. A secret represents a rivalry between two parts of the brain, one that wants to tell and one that doesn't.

No comments: