Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

by David Eagleman

If the conscious mind—the part you consider you—accounts for only a tiny fraction of the brain’s function, what is all the rest doing? This is the question that David Eagleman—renowned neuroscientist and acclaimed author of Sum—answers in a book as accessible and entertaining as it is deeply informed by startling, up-to-the-minute research.

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology, Science, Neuroscience, Brain, Philosophy, Audiobook

272 pages, Hardcover

First published May 31, 2011

About the author

David Eagleman is an internationally bestselling author, a TED speaker, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He teaches neuroscience at Stanford University and is CEO of a neurotech startup, Neosensory. At night he writes. His books have been translated into 33 languages.

Reviews

[Robyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Let me start with the easy stuff. On a literary note, this book is entertaining. However, it reads more like a series of interesting essays on neuroscience rather than a book.

Let me move on to the more interesting stuff. This book is deceptive. Eagleman uses a "slight of hand" writing style. Just as he describes how magic tricks deceive the brain, Eagleman uses this entertaining little book to advocate for a social and justice system that disregards civil rights.

How does he do this? He strings together an a serious of interesting tidbits about how the brain is controlled by chemistry and its hardwiring. For example, he outlines research on split brain patients and the difference between the right and left sides. He explains how we become "wired" for routine actions, such as driving to work, and can put forward little effort on accomplishing such things.

When he has you hooked, he launches into a treatise about how the criminal justice system should be used to correct our brains for he assumes that criminal activity is the result of a brain not functioning correctly. He admits that frontal lobotomies were a clumsy early attempt to do this, but he feels science is much more advanced now and continues to advance every day. For those who do not have "correctable" problems, he actually uses the work "warehouse" for their fate.

The bottom line is that he believes in "treatment" for those who commit crimes. On the surface, this sounds enlightened. But when you take a step back from this book, this idea is disturbing. Our criminal justice system, in fact our whole legal framework, is based on the underlying assumption that individuals have the right to control their own bodies. Even when they have forfeited the right to be physically free and are imprisoned, our government does not have the right to force medical treatment and that includes psychological treatment.

Eagleton is advocating for "treating" criminals. This should send a chill up his readers' spines. Our sordid history of "treating" criminals includes institutionalizing gays and lesbians and "treating" them for their "disorder", medical experiments with African American prisoners, and institutionalizing people with developmental disabilities for the minor offenses.

This is a dangerous road. But what is particularly disturbing about this book is Eagleton's deceptive approach. He does not acknowledge or give weight to any of the counterarguments to this approach, which you think should be standard for his "scientific approach". In fact, he positions himself as being "enlightened" because he does not advocate for the "lock up and throw away the key" approach. I can only think back to another book that I read this year - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and how we must carefully balance the rights of individuals with scientific principles.

[Amir Tesla · Rating 5 out of 5]

ظاهرا روحی در کار نیست!!!
این کتاب هم مثل بقیه کتابهایی که توی زمینه نوروساینس (عصب شناسی مغز) خوندم بسیار از چیزهایی رو که در مورد مذهب و دین به ما گفتن رو با اصول و علم و مثال های بسیار زیر سوال می بره
یادمه کتاب های دینیمون یه سری دلایل برای اثبات روح میاوردن به طور مثال رویاهای صادقه یا خواب هایی که می بینیم و حکایت از آینده می کنن
یا ارگان های بدن مثل قلب و و معده و رگها که چه طور بدون کنترل ما کار می کنن
یا اینکه اگر عضوی از بدن قطع بشه خصوصیات اخلاقی شخص تغییری نخواهد کرد
متاسفانه یا خوش بختانه برای تمامی این ها الان دلایل علمی اثبات شده ای وجود داره که هیچ ارتباطی هم به روح نداره.
یک سری آسیب ها به بخش های متفاوتی از مغز وارد شده که اثرات زیر رو در افراد داشته . در موردشون تعمق کنید:
1. فردی که از یک شخصیت اهل خانواده و وفادار تبدیل به یک هرزه جنسی و علاقه مند به کودکان می شه که البته بعد از جراحی که رو مغزش انجام می شه به حالت نرمال بر میگرده
2. یک شخص آکادمیک معقول، بعد از یک دوره چندماهه که تغییراتی در خودش احساس می کنه، به یک دفعه اسلحه بر می داره و در دانشگاه چندین نفر رو می کشه (در خاطراتش می نویسه بعد از مرگم مغزم و بررسی کنید که در بررسی ها مشخص می شه یک غده در مغزش رشد کرده که توضیحات دفترچه خاطراتش مبنی بر تغییراتی که حس می کرده رو توضیح می ده)
3. مرد متاهل و نرمالی که بعد از مصرف زیاد هرمون تستسترون در یک شب زن و بچه و خودش رو به قتل می رسونه
4. مدیر پروژه ی با دیسیپلین و با سابقه ای که بعد از سوراخ شدن جمجمه و آسیب دیدن پری فرانتال کورتکس مغزش و سپری کردن دوره بهبودیش تبدیل به یک آدم عیاش می شه که رفتارهای به شدن پرخاش گرانه و عصبی از خود نشون می ده و کنترلی روی هیچ احساسیش نداره
نتیجه شخصی من این هست که شاید روح اونقدرها هم تعیین کننده خلق و خو و احساسات ما نیست!!!
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در بخش های دیگه کتاب می خونید که ما دنیا رو اونطوری که هست نمی بینیم. بلکه مغزمون تصاویر رو بر اساس انتظاراتی که داره می سازه. دلیلی که یک سری تصاویر ذهن ما رو فریب می دن همین موضوع هست.
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بخش دیگری از کتاب سراغ این موضوع می ره که اغلب تصمیماتی که می گیریم و کارهایی که می کنیم، تصمیم گیری در اصل توسط لایه های پایینی مغز انجام شده که هیچ کنترلی روشون نداریم.
طبق بررسی های اف ام ار ای، قبل از اینکه یک تصمیم به ضمیر خود آگاهمون وارد بشه و از اون با خبر بشیم، اون تصمیم یک ثانیه قبل توسط لایه پایین تر مغز ساخته و پرداخته شده.
تمثیل جالب کتاب این هست که می گه وقتی ما فکر می کنیم ایده ها و تصمیماتمون حاصل تفکر خودمون هست مثل این می مونه که تیتر روزنامه ای رو بخونیم و فکر کنیم پدید آونده کل خبرهای تحت اون تیتر ما هستیم
عجیب اما واقعی ...
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یک قسمت بسیار جالب و تامل برانگیز کتاب در مورد اثرات بیماری سرع بود که باعث می شه فرد صداهایی در ذهنش بشنوه و افراد تحت تاثیر این بیماری تمایلات شدید مذهبی پیدا می کنن و مدعی می شن که با خدا یا افراد قدیس در ارتباط هستند. نه اینکه قصد فریب کاری داشته باشند، بلکه تحت تاثیر توهماتی هستند که مغزشون براشون می سازه
مثال های متفاوتی از این دست اشخاص می زنه از جمله دختر شونزده ساله ای به اسم ژوان آرک که اعتقاد داشت و سربازان فرانسوی رو هم متقاعد کرد که با قدیسانی چون مایکل، کاترین، مارگارت، گابریل و غیره در ارتباط و موج یک سری جنگ های صدساله رو به راه انداخت
این بیماری اسمش صرع لوب تمپورال هست
نویسنده این مسئله رو به پیامران هم بسط می ده و تلویحا میگه ادعای وحی ممکن هست تحت تاثیر همین مضوع باشه
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من به هیچ عنوان قصد نتیجه گیری، رد یا تایید مذهب و ... ندارم.
به نظرم دوستانی که به فلسفه و حقیقت علاقه مند هستن حتما باید کتاب های عصب شناسی مغز رو هم مطالعه کنند
در مورد تجربه شخصی خودم، ریشه بسیاری از مسائلی که مذهب به ما وراء ربط می ده رو من در سیستم کار کردن بدن و مغز پیدا کردم.
قرآن یه آیه داره:
نحن اقرب علیک من حبل الورید
همانا ما از رگ گردن به شما نزدیک تریم
شاید تفسیرهای ما از مذهب چندان درست نبودن ...

[PattyMacDotComma · Rating 5 out of 5]

5★ from both sides of my brain
The only David Eagleman book I’d read was my favourite book, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, a collection of extremely short extremely thought-provoking stories. So I really wasn’t sure what to expect from a book from his “day job” as a neuroscientist. I needn’t have worried.

While this is a non-fiction book about the biology of the brain, it is just as intriguingly thought-provoking as Sum. There are footnotes and an extensive reference list and index, for the academically inclined, but the writing style is accessible and, dare I say, entertainingly philosophical.

The title of the first chapter, from Pink Floyd, indicates that. “There’s someone in my head, and it’s not me.” Reading this will give you an idea of whether that’s true or not, and if so, who that someone might be. There are numerous case histories and anecdotes, many of which seem like they’re straight out of an old Ripley’s Believe it or Not. The book was written in 2011, so some of the stories which sounded familiar to me probably are, because they may have been quoted from this book.

The best I can do here is share some things I found interesting, for example, in today’s 24/7 media releases of political talking points, you might like to know that there is an "'illusion-of-truth’ effect: you are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before—whether or not it is actually true.” Scary eh?

I won’t bother you with the tests that have been done to prove these things are so, just take my word for it – they’re covered and referenced, if you’re looking for more information. Things like the genes that are shared by about 50% of the general population are carried by an overwhelming number of perpetrators of violent crimes and by over 98% of people on death row. A predisposition to violence, you might say. So whose fault are the crimes?

Then there’s a take on "seeing is believing". We each “see” things the way we do, not necessarily the way our family and friends do. There’s a condition called synesthesia, meaning ‘joined sensation’, where sensing something with one sense will trigger another. Sound may be not only heard, but also experienced as colour. Numbers may be associated with colours.

Synesthetes may have 3-dimensional views of calendars and time and be able to point to spots on space where those times and dates lie. I have mental time-lines and calendar lines in my mind’s eye, but they certainly aren’t floating in space that I know of. Eagleman says “Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.”

There’s a fascinating section on The Democracy of the Mind. Rather than have an assembly line mind where each little component does its assigned role and contributes to a whole picture or state, we work with a competition model, where different parts of us want different things and may argue with each other about it. You know the feeling – the chocolate bar is beckoning, but then you’ve promised yourself you’re going to be more health-conscious.

This democratic system of making decisions by weighing up pros and cons is why good governing systems work well when you have people with different opinions and different strengths contributing to the process. Eagleman gives good examples of how this works in world politics.

He also identifies the “two-party system” for the brain: the rational and the emotional. He admits these are just handy words, not specific terms for discussing how we deal with this split. He always gives completely understandable, real-world examples to illustrate what he means.

In this case, he says, “as a rough guide, rational cognition involves external events while emotion involves your internal state. You can do a math problem without consulting your internal state, but you can’t order a dessert off a menu or prioritize what you feel like doing next.”

And did you know you could live perfectly normally with only half your brain? Better if the half is removed before you are 8 years old, but even after that, what we can do is remarkable. This is the right or left half, not just any old half, by the way. We seem to have built-in redundancy, which makes me wonder what we could do if we really used the whole thing!

He cautions against reductionism, which proposes that you can understand things better if you keep breaking them down into smaller and smaller components. Sometimes, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, e.g., an airplane: no single part has flight properties, but put them all together, and you’re off!

Observation won’t always do it either. He gives an example of what he calls Radio Theory. A bushman who’s never seen a transistor radio, picks one up, fiddles with it, hears voices, takes it apart and fiddles with wires, and discovers when he pulls one wire out, it stops. When he sticks it back, it works, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, depending on the dials. He may think the voices depend on the wires, and will seem brilliant, until someone asks how the voices got there.

Eagleman mentions that Arthur C. Clarke said you couldn’t really tell advanced technology from magic. He was right. It is all magic.

The book ends saying: "What a perplexing masterpiece the brain is and how lucky we are to be in a generation that has the technology and the will to turn our attention to it. It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.”

Absolutely fascinating. This is just the smallest taste.

[Petra X]

What intrigued me about this book were some of the questions it is going to answer: why is your foot on the brake faster than your brain at seeing danger? Why, no matter where your attention might be, you can always hear your name mentioned in a conversation even if you weren't involved in it? How can you get angry with yourself? Who is upset with whom? I'd never even thought of these things, let alone that that the answers were neurological.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a must read! What a fascinating book. Not only full of interesting ideas, but also hugely readable.

It's a mouthful, but relevant, to mention that the author is director of Baylor College of Medicine's Initiative on Neuroscience and Law, at Stanford University.

As the book progresses, it can be seen as an argument for assessing and handling criminals differently. Eagleman thinks we should pay much more attention to the physical and psychological factors which may influence individual criminals, rather than regarding the person in the dock as coming from a level playing field, where all people are the same. To back his argument, he spends much of the book convincing us that we are propelled through life by subconscious urges, fed by a soup of genes and hormones. I found his argument convincing. Most of all this book is wonderfully exciting. It's a darn good read.

I end with my usual bunch of notes - nearly all just taken from the book. Enter here at your peril. I have droned on even more than usual.

The power behind the throne

You gleefully say, "I just thought of something!", when in fact your brain performed an enormous amount of work before your moment of genius struck. When an idea is served up from behind the scenes, your neural circuitry has been working on it for hours or days or years, consolidating information and trying out new combinations. But you take credit without further wonderment at the vast, hidden machinery behind the scenes.

Almost the entirety of what happens in your mental life is not under your conscious control, and the truth is that it's better this way.... When it meddles in details it doesn't understand, the operation runs less effectively. The best way to mess up your piano piece is to concentrate on your fingers; the best way to get out of breath is to think about your breathing; the best way to miss the golf ball is to analyse your swing.

How to know if you're a racist, a homophobe etc.

We often do not know what's buried in the caverns of our unconscious. An example of this comes up, in its ugliest form, with racism.

Even if someone is unwilling to say they are racist, there are ways of probing what is in the unconscious brain. Imagine that you sit down in front of two buttons, and you're asked to hit the right button whenever a positive word flashes on the screen (joy, love, happy, and so on), and the left button whenever you see a negative word (terrible, nasty, failure). Pretty straightforward. Now the task changes a bit: hit the right button whenever you see a photo of an overweight person, and the left button whenever you see a photo of a thin person. Again, pretty easy. But for the next task, things are paired up: you're asked to hit the right button when you see either a positive world or and overweight person, and the left button whenever you see a negative word or, a thin person. In another group of trials, you do the same thing but with the pairings switched - so you now press the right button for a negative world or a thin person.

The results can be troubling. The reaction times of subject are faster when the pairings have a strong association unconsciously. For example, if overweight people are linked with a negative association in the subject's unconscious, then the subject reacts faster to a photo of an overweight person when the response is linked to the same button as a negative word. During trials in which the opposite concepts are linked (thin with bad), subjects will take a longer time to respond, presumably because the pairing is more difficult. This experiment has been modified to measure implicit attitudes towards races, religions, homosexuality, skin tone, age, disabilities, and presidential candidates. (Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz, "Measuring individual differences." )

Hunches

Often when we have hunches about things, this is due to our subconscious having worked something out before our conscious mind is aware of it. Sometimes conscious knowledge of a situation is not required for making advantageous decisions.

Consciousness as a CEO

Consciousness is the long-term planner, the CEO of the company, while most of the day-to-day operations are run by all those parts of the brain to which we have no access.

Accessing the unconscious brain.

The next time a friend laments that she cannot decide between two options, tell her the easiest way to solve her problem: flip a coin. She should specify which option belongs to heads and which to tails, and then let the coin fly. The important part is to assess her gut feeling after the coin lands. If she feels a subtle sense of relief at being "told" what to do by the coin, that's the right choice for her. If, instead, she concludes that it's ludicrous for her to make a decision based on a coin toss, that will cue her to choose the other option

Our conscious minds train us, then our subconscious takes over

Riding a bike, playing tennis or golf, or driving a car....at first the conscious mind teaches us how to do these things, but as we continue to do these things over and over again, the subconscious takes over.

We are pre-programmed

Nothing seems more natural than desire, but the first thing to notice is that we're wired only for species-appropriate desire. This underscores a simple but crucial point: the brain's circuits are designed to generate behaviour that is appropriate to our survival. Apples and eggs and potatoes taste good to us not because the shapes of their molecules are inherently wonderful, but because they're perfect little packages of sugars and proteins...Because the foods are useful, we are engineered to find them tasty.

Consider babies. Babies at birth are not blank slates. Instead they inherit a great deal of problem-solving equipment and arrive at many problems with solutions already at hand. .... They pop into the world with neural programs specialized for reasoning about objects, physical causality, numbers, the biological world, the beliefs and motivations of other individuals, and social interactions. For example, a newborn's brain expects faces: even when they are less than ten minutes old, babies will turn toward face-like patterns, but not to scrambled versions of the same pattern. But two and a half months, and infant will express surprise if a solid object appears to pass through another object, or if an object seems to disappear, as though by magic, from behind a screen. Infants show a difference in the way they treat animate versus inanimate objects, making the assumption that animate toys have internal states (intentions) that they cannot see....

Another example of preprogramming is the so-called mind reading system - this is the collection of mechanisms by which we use the direction and movement of other people's eyes to infer what they want, know, and believe. For example, if someone abruptly looks over your left shoulder, you'll immediately suppose there is something interesting going on behind you. Our gaze-reading system is fully in place in early infancy. In conditions like autism this system can be impaired. 84

Monogamy, vasopressin and the gene RS3 334.

Common sense would tell us that monogamy is a decision based on moral character, right? But this leads to the question of what constitutes "character" in the first place. Could this, too, be guided by mechanisms below the radar of consciousness?

Consider the prairie vole... Unlike other voles and other mammals more generally, prairie voles remain monogamous. The reason pivots on hormones.

When a male vole repeatedly mates with a female, a hormone called vasopressin is released in his brain. The vasopressin binds to receptors in a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens and the binding mediates a pleasurable feeling that becomes associated with that female. This locks in the monogamy, which is known as pair-bonding. If you block this hormone, the pair bonding goes away. Amazingly, when researchers crank up the levels of vasopressin with genetic techniques, they can shift polygamous species to monogamous behaviour.

In 2008 a research team at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden examined the gene for the vasopressin receptor in 5452 men in long-term heterosexual relationships. The researchers found that a section of the gene called RS3 334 can come in variable numbers. The more copies, the weaker the effect that vasopressin in the bloodstream would have in the brain. The results were surprising in their simplicity. The number of copies correlated with the men's pair-bonding behaviour. Men with more copies of RS3 334 scored worse on measures of pair-bonding - including measures of the strength of their relationships, perceived marital problems, and marital quality as perceived by their spouses. Those with two copies were more likely to be unmarried, and if they were married, they were more likely to have marital troubles.

This is not to say that choices and environment don't matter - they do. But it is to say that we come into the world with different dispositions. Some men may be genetically inclined to have a single partner, while some may not.

The democratic brain

Brains are like representative democracies. They are built of multiple, over-lapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices. As Walt Whitman correctly surmised, we are large and we harbour multitudes within us. And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle.

There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behaviour. As a result, you can accomplish the strange feats of arguing with yourself, cursing at yourself, and cajoling yourself to do something - feats that modern computers simply do not do. For instance when you are offered a slice of cake. Part of you wants it and part of you tries to muster the fortitude to forgo it. The final vote of the parliament determines which party controls your action. In the end you either eat the cake or you do not, but you cannot do both.

The brain is best understood as a team of rivals... In the same way that liberals and conservatives both love their country but can have acrimoniously different strategies for steering it, so too does the brain have competing factions that all believe they know the right way to solve the problem.

Re Mel Gibson and his drunken anti-Semitic tirade, we can ask whether there is such a thing as "true" colours. We have seen that behaviour is the outcome of the battle among internal systems.... A team-of-rivals brain can naturally harbour both racist and non-racist feelings. Alcohol is not a truth serum. Instead, it tends to tip the battle toward the short-term, unreflective faction - which has no more or less claim than any other faction to be the "true" one.

Neurochemistry of the brain

When the frontal lobe is compromised, people become "disinhibited", unmasking the presence of the seedier elements in the neural democracy. A common example of this disinhibited behaviour is seen in patients with frontotemporal dementia, a tragic disease in which the frontal and temporal lobes degenerate. With the loss of the brain tissue, patients lost the ability to control the hidden impulses. To the frustration of their loved ones, these patients unearth an endless variety of way to violate social norms: shoplifting in front of store managers, removing their clothes in public, running stop signs, breaking out in song at inappropriate times, eating food scraps found in public trash cans, or being physically aggressive or sexually transgressive.

For another example of changes in the brain leading to changes in behaviour, consider what has happened in the treatment of Parkinson's disease. In 2001, families of Parkinson's patients began to notice that when they were given a drug called pramipexole, some of them turned into pathological gamblers. For some, the new addiction reached beyond gambling to compulsive eating, alcohol consumption and hypersexuality. This was due to imbalances in the dopamine system of rewards. Lowering levels of the drug could usually get rid of these side-effects.

The more we discover about the circuitry of the brain, the less we can accuse depressives of being indulgent, or a child doing poorly at school of being unmotivated and slow. Instead we see the option of problems with the neurochemistry of the brain. Our perceptions and behaviours are controlled by inaccessible subroutines that can be easily perturbed, as seen with the frontotemporal dementia victims, and the Parkinsonian gamblers. But there's a critical point hidden in here. Just because we've shifted away from the blame does not mean we have a full understanding of the biology.

Neurochemistry is incredibly complicated.

Although we know that there is a strong relationship between brain and behaviour, neuroimaging remains a crude technology, unable to meaningfully weigh in on assessments of guilt or innocence, especially on an individual basis.

In the future, problems that are now opaque will open up to examination by new techniques, and we may someday find that certain types of bad behaviour will have a meaningful biological explanation - as has happened with schizophrenia, epilepsy, depression and mania. Currently we can detect only large brain tumours, but in one hundred years we will be able to detect patterns at unimaginably small levels of the microcircuitry that correlate with behavioural problems.

The heart of the problem is that it no longer makes sense to ask, 'To what extent was it his biology and to what extent was it him?" The question no longer makes sense because we now understand those to be the same thing.

Now, there's a critical nuance to appreciate here. Not everyone with a brain tumour undertakes a mass shooting. Why not? As we will see, it is because genes and environment interact in unimaginably complex patterns. As a result, human behaviour will always remain unpredictable.

The main difference between teenage and adult brains is the development of the frontal lobes. The human prefrontal cortex does not fully develop until the early twenties, and this underlies the impulsive behaviour of teenagers. The frontal lobes are sometimes called the organ of socialization.

Consider someone who gets rip-roaring drunk on a Saturday night. Zombie systems which have been lurking under the surface the whole time, are no longer masked by normally functioning frontal lobe. Instead they are disinhibited, and climb onto the main stage.

Work is being done with people, using bars on a computer to exercise their frontal lobes, to give them greater self-reflection and socialization (Stephen LaConte and Pearl Chiu)

The legal system is built partially upon the premise that humans are all equal before the law. This built-in myth of human equality suggests that all people are equally capable of decision making, impulse control, and comprehending consequences. While admirable, the notion is simply not true.

Socialization

People can however be modified. The child who is scolded for shoplifting, is being socialized. We need to differentiate between those who are modifiable, such a a teenager who still needs further frontal development, and someone with frontal lobe damage, who will never develop the capacity for socialization. The latter should be incapacitated by the state in a different sort of institution.

Gene complexity

Not everyone has heard that the Human Genome Project has been, in some ways, a failure. Once we sequenced the whole code, we didn't get hoped-for breakthrough answers about the genes that are unique to mankind; instead we discovered a massive recipe book for building the nuts and bolts of biological organisms..... Imagine going to different factories and examining the pitches and lengths of the screws used. This would tell you little about the function of the final product - say, a toaster versus a blow dryer. Both have similar elements configured into different functions.

We have to acknowledge that successive levels of reduction are doomed to tell us very little about the questions important to humans.... Most diseases are polygenetic, meaning that they result from subtle contributions from tens or even hundreds of different genes. And as science develops better techniques, we are discovering that not just the coding regions of genes matter, but also the areas in between - what used to be thought of as 'junk' DNA. Most diseases seem to result from a perfect storm of numerous minor changes that combine in dreadfully complex ways. 210/211

The importance of environment interacting with physical factors

Plus the contributions from the genome can really be understood only in the context of interaction with the environment. For instance many hundred of genes have been found to correlate with schizophrenia, yet one of the critical factors in developing schizophrenia seems to be the stress of being an immigrant to a new country. In studies across countries, immigrant groups who differ most in culture and appearance from the host population, carry the highest risk of developing it.

You stand an 828 percent higher chance of committing a violent crime if you carry the Y chromosome, ie if you are male; but why aren't all males criminal? That is, only 1 percent of males are incarcerated. The answer is that knowledge of the genes alone is not sufficient to tell you much about behaviour. The way in which your body can process things like serotonin, and the environment in which you are brought up, are relevant as well.

There are genes that can predispose one to depression, but it usually takes bad life events as well, to trigger a depression.

Another example comes from the observation that smoking cannabis as a teenager increases the probability of developing psychosis as an adult. But this connection is true only for some people, and not for others. A genetic variation underlies one's susceptibility to this. With one combination of alleles, there is a strong link between cannabis use and adult psychosis; with a different combination, the link is week.

Similarly, psychologists Angela Scarpa and Adrian Raine measured differences in brain function among people diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder - a syndrome characterized by a total disregard for the feelings and rights of others, and one that is highly prevalent among the criminal population. The researchers found that antisocial personality disorder had the highest likelihood of occurring when brain abnormalities were combined with a history of adverse environmental experiences. In other words, if you have certain problems with your brain but are raised in a good home, your might turn out okay. If your brain is fine and your home is terrible, you might still turn out fine. But if you have mild brain damage and end up with a bad home life, you're tossing the dice for a very unlucky synergy. 215.

______

The Brain with David Eagleman. What is Reality? BBC (You Tube) 1 hour. Actually this comes in 4 parts, which I am currently watching. Highly recommended!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvPu2...

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

*I am required to disclose that I received this book as a freebie from the Goodreads first reads giveaway program, but don't worry, this doesn't obligate me to say only good things.

Though I give the book four stars and have already recommended it to more people than any book I've ever read, I would strongly disagree with the first reviewer that the book is an "engaging romp" or "fun".
The book is, and should be, profoundly unsettling, though for reasons which make it all the more important to confront. Eagleman creates a compelling account for rethinking the answer to the question "who am I?", one that will have you profoundly questioning former assumptions and intuitions.
Incognito tells of homicidal sleepwalkers, people who hear color and taste sounds, and a condition in which a blind person is perfectly convinced that they can see. It poses the questions: To what extent does it make sense to refer to my conscious self as "my true self"? To what extent does the concept of free will make sense on a neurological level? How much of my reality is a perception of my physical surrounding, and how much might be an interpretation offered by my brain?
Eagleman manages to address these questions in a very readable account, and you can't help but share in his contagious enthusiasm for how cool neuroscience is. If you like being wowed and challenged, read this book. Just be forewarned that it might force you to seriously reconsider the way your look at your world and your self.

[Alisa Kester · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another hard one to review. If I were going by the first few chapters, it would have been not only five stars, but one of my personal 'Best Books of 2011'. However, in the last two thirds the content took a nose dive into absurdity. The author first attempts to prove that we have no free will, because much of our behavior is ruled by the subconscious. Um...last time I checked, my subconscious was still *me*. Then, the author puts forward a case that because criminals do bad things, they are clearly all brain-damaged, and thus don't have the same level of 'blameworthiness' for their crimes as 'normal' people do. He compares them to people who have disorders like Tourette's. He spends chapters building this case, and ignoring this simple fact: Tourette's sufferers cannot control their actions, but criminals can...if they want to. When was the last time you saw a burglar steal in front of a policeman? If the burglar truly was brain-damaged, and 'had no control' over what he did, then the simple presence of a cop wouldn't stop him.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incognito is fascinating. I never tire of reading about the brain, an organ so complex that I doubt scientists will ever fully understand it. (Scientists still can't answer questions about consciousness, for instance: what it is exactly, where it's located, and whether it might be eternal.) Neuroscientist David Eagleman packed his book with some the most astounding facts I've ever read, most of which I'd never heard of before or even considered. My favorite brain fact is in this book, still, years after I read Incognito and after reading other brain books.

The topic has the potential to be textbook-like, but readers shouldn't be scared of Incognito. Eagleman is brilliant, but he wanted his book to be for the lay reader and its style is engaging and accessible without being condescending. I also recommend his short and quirky Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, a fictional brain-based book.

(This review is cross-posted on The Story Graph and LibraryThing.)

[Ahmed · Rating 4 out of 5]

المتخفي( الحيوات السرية للدماغ).....ديفيد إيجلمان
ت/حمزة بن قبلان المزيني

كتاب رائع ملهم، وسلس جدا لدرجة انه كان أقرب لرواية بطلها الدماغ البشري بكل تفاصيله وخلاياه وعملياته غاية التعقيد.

في نوع معين من الكتب لما بخلصها بيبقى نفسي اكلم الناس كلها عنه، واوزع منه هدايا عليهم، الكتاب دا من النوعية دي، النوعية المدهشة، اللي رغم تعقيد موضوعه وكم الاشتباكات الكثيرة معه، مكتوب بطريقةبسيطة جدا.

الكتاب جميل على اكثر من جهة، لتبسيطه من ناحية، وموسوعيته من ناحية تانية، ودمجه بين مواضيع مختلفة بتناسق.

[Trevor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a much better book than I thought it was going to be and a much better book than you might think from even flicking through it. You know, there are cartoons and while this isn't a guaranteed sign that things will be bad, it is the next best thing to a guarantee.

And I listened to this as a talking book - and the author reads the book. This, too, is generally a mistake. But he did a reasonable job even here, although, to be honest, I think he would have been better served with a professional.

A lot of this book confirms my prejudices - so, of course, I approve of it immediately. Some of those prejudices include the idea that our personalities (our souls) are in fact elaborately constructed by the physical reality of our brains. He ends this book by somewhat calling this into question, but I like to see that mostly as him covering his bum, just in case.

The bits of this that were particularly interesting, though, were not so much the speculations on consciousness and quantum theory - despite what he has to say on this about keeping an open mind, I still wonder about the point of raising this at all - but rather what he has to say about the nature of consciousness as has been illuminated by science and the implications of those illuminations. And for the first nine-tenths of this book he gives one surprising example after another.

Until I got distracted recently I was reading a book called - The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. This is a mind-blowing work. The review will come eventually. Anyway, this book also looks at visual perception and how our brains constructs what we see - or, more accurately, what we think we see. We imagine we get a beautifully clear, panoramic view of the world and all for the remarkably low cost of opening our eyes. However, the reality is nothing at all like the appearance. In fact, rather than what we think we get when we open our eyes - about 250 degrees or fairly clear photograph of the world - in fact we get a rather tiny clear spot of attention and a brain that deludes us by filling in the rest in broad strokes. And he proves this in the most remarkable ways. The first is by way of a test of peripheral vision where he gets someone to look directly at his nose while he holds some coloured pencils in his hand at arms length. They are asked to say what colours and what order the pencils are in his hand. If we had the kind of vision we think we do this ought to be simplicity itself - but we don't have the kind of vision we think we do.

But the best example he gives is something I have known for years but didn't realise could be so easily shown. We all know that light enters the eye through a lens which inverts the image and displays it upside down on the retina at the back of the eye. We like to think of this inverted image as a perfect little picture of the world - not unlike a video camera image. And we think the amazing thing that happens with this image is that our brain flips it around so it is right way up. The problem is this is by far the least impressive trick our brain does. Think about your retina as a cinema screen. The problem is that you need to get the image formed on this screen to your brain and the cable guy who put in the cable to transmit this data to your brain stuck the cable right in the middle of the screen. That means there are two great big holes right in the middle of your vision. Now, you may have noticed that you have never noticed these holes. That's because your brain fills them in. But do you want to see the hole? Place your hands in front of you so that your index fingers are pointing to the sky and your thumbs are touching and hold your hands about thirty centimetres (a foot for those of you still on base twelve) from your eyes. Close your left eye and do not move your focus from your left finger. Move your fingers away from your body and while still focused on your right finger notice what happens to your left finger - what happens is that it disappears. It disappears because it moves into your blind spot - the hole in your visual field. But you don't see a dark spot - your brain just fills in more background scene - background scene you know isn't actually there, because your finger is there. Think about that for a moment. The vast majority of what you think you see is actually stuff that you brain made up. And as long as no problems are encountered the made up world is the one you are most contented in living in.

But wait, there's more. We are quite sure we have free will - but what is really interesting is some experiments reported here that seriously call this into question. One is where they get split brain patients and show them different words in their different eyes. Say, flower and tablecloth. They then tell the people to touch the object they had shown to them. People touch both a flower and a tablecloth - but only one side of their brain has the power of speech and so when they are asked why they touched the tablecloth the real answer should be, I've no idea. But this is never the answer given. Rather people make stuff up. They say things like, "I've been wanting to buy a tablecloth like this for years and just wanted to see if it felt as nice as it looks". Very, very often our 'motivation' for doing something is added only after we have seen ourselves doing it.

There is a really interesting discussion on the problem of guilt given our questionable volition, and the perfectly sensible suggestion that we should only punish people if we think it will change their behaviour in the future. I know those of you who like the idea of punishment for punishment's sake won't like this suggestion very much, but it does seem to make sense to me. But then, I've crazy leftwing views with these things and don't really get off on the idea of punishing people for things beyond their control.

There is a very long discussion on the incident where Mel Gibson told a Jewish cop that Jews were the cause of all wars in the world when he was pulled over for driving while being about twice the legal blood alcohol level. This is presented as some kind of proof that we are multiple people in the one body - and while I think this is true, as far as it goes, I don't think the example given is all that useful, mostly because I think the writer constantly misinterprets what actually happened in this case. Gibson later said he was not anti-semitic, and, I for one, think that is actually the case. What I think happened was that when Gibson was pulled over he knew he was buggered. This cop was going to cause him lots of pain - he was about to lose his license and be involved in a court case that would be embarrassing. The alcohol in his system told him - you need to kick this guy's arse. But how? He could have said, "I think you police aren't very nice people" - but it is just possible that the policeman may not have been terribly upset by this. A bit like Mel kicking the guy with a pair of fluffy slippers. However, there were a pair of steal tipped jackboots available. Do you for a second think that if the policeman was black Gibson would have started to rant about Jews ruling the world? Hardly. What Gibson did was unforgivable, but it was about something other than him 'displaying the racist within' - this was about grabbing whatever is available to hurt someone who is hurting you in the most painful way possible. Not pretty, but something quite different to what is discussed in this book.

All the same, this is a fascinating book and remarkably simply written, despite the quite complicated ideas presented. An interesting book to read after Freud's Interpretation of Dreams - and remarkably consistent with the central ideas of that book too.

[Carolyn Lane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Neuroscientists need to be pretty smart people. Even smarter is the neuroscientist who can produce writing which is attractive and appealing to our less-informed minds. David Eagleman can.

Incognito is a wide-ranging and entertaining look at the development of our thinking about thinking, and the current state of brain-science. He covers
• how and why we have practically no conscious knowledge of what’s going on in the incredibly complex machinery of our brains, and why the “chief executive” (our consciousness) is only brought into play on occasion
• how totally misleading the “evidence” of our senses and our common-sense can be
• how our minds contain multitudes of “ourselves” – so we can argue with ourselves, laugh at ourselves and make contracts with ourselves
• and how vulnerable our brains are to small things that can change our functioning radically.
Which all means… we’re not really driving the boat, even though we fool ourselves that we are. Our unconscious is at the wheel, driving from charts of “innumerable generations of evolutionary selection and a lifetime of experiences” and only enlisting our conscious mind from time to time.

It’s pretty challenging stuff for those of us who have spent lifetimes working on polishing our decision-making skills and exploring our consciousness.

It’s even more challenging when his research-study-by-research-study compilation of the above premises brings us to the big questions of “where then does our free will operate?” “What then does being culpable or blameworthy, in a criminal sense, mean?”
And, his central question in this book comes through from his role as director of Baylor College of Medicine’s Initiative on Neuroscience and Law – “how do we design a forward-looking , brain-compatible legal system?”

He is not arguing that “to understand all is to forgive all”, but rather that while people who break social contracts need to be “warehoused” away from society, there is a difference between those who can then modify their own patterns and strengthen their self-control mechanisms through something he calls “the prefrontal workout”, and those who can’t. Different treatment is required.

Having thrown that stone into the pool, he then moves back to perhaps more familiar territory about consciousness, self-knowledge, nature/nurture, reductionism/emergence, and finishes with another big idea – that our brain is only the hub of a broader socio-biological system.

But what has stuck with me is the question about how we need to redesign our ways of dealing with criminal behaviour. It was so cleverly structured into the book. I was reading along going ‘yes, yes, I get that’ as he tracked through what was partly familiar research and interpretation and explanation and sense-making … then wham. A really tough “so what do we need to DO, now that we know what we know?” question.

It’s changed my thinking – and that’s the best thing I can say about any book. Thank you David.

Incognito – The Secret Lives of the Brain
David Eagleman, The Text Publishing Company Melbourne, 2011
www.eagleman.com

[Koray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kitap tek kelimeyle "MÜ-KEM-MEL!!!" Alıntıları yazıyorum ki dönüp dönüp tekrar okuyayım:

SIRRI AÇIĞA VURMAK / “...Sırrı açığa vurmamanın ana nedeni, bunun olası uzun dönemli sonuçlarına ilişkin duyulan endişedir. Bir dostunuz sizin hakkınızda kötü düşünebilir, sevgiliniz kırılabilir, toplumdan dışlanabilirsiniz. İnsanların sırlarını daha çok yabancılara açması, yaşanacak sonuca dair duydukları endişenin kanıtıdır. Nöral çatışma, böylece herhangi bir bedel ödenmeksizin atlatılmış olur. Uçakta karşılaştığınız yabancıların durup dururken kendilerini size yakın hissedip evlilik sorunlarını bütün ayrıntılarıyla anlatmalarının, günah çıkarma kabinlerinin dünyanın en büyük dinlerinden birinde yerini hâlâ koruyor olmasının nedeni de budur. Bu olgu, benzer şekilde dua etmenin cazibesini de açıklayabilir; özellikle de tanrıların son derece kişisel olduğu ve kullarını sonsuz bir sevgiyle, pür dikkat dinlediği dinlerde. Sırları yabancılara ifşa erme, kökleri çok eskilere uzanan bir ihtiyaçtır. Siz de mutlaka fark etmişsinizdir ki, bir sırrı açık etmenin nedeni, genellikle yalnızca açık etmiş olmaktır; yoksa, tavsiye istemek değil. Dinleyici, olur da sırla birlikte ortaya dökülen soruna bariz bir çözüm görüp bunu önerme gafletinde bulunursa da, anlatanı öfkelendirmekle kalır yalnızca. Çünkü, anlatıcının aslında tek derdi sırrını anlatmaktır. Sırrı anlatmak, başlı başına çözümün ta kendisidir çoğu zaman. Henüz yanıtlanmamış bir soru ise, dinleyicinin neden ille de insan -ya da tanrı örneğini düşünecek olursak, insansı- olması gerektiğidir. Bir duvara, kertenkeleye ya da keçiye sırrını anlatmak, ne de olsa çok daha az tatmin edicidir…”
AMİGDALA HASARI / “..Charles Whitman, 1966 Ağustosunun sıcak ve nemli ilk gününde, kendisini Austin’deki Teksas Üniversitesi kulesinin en üst katına götürecek olan asansöre bindi. Yirmi beş yaşındaki genç, daha sonra bir bavul dolusu silah ve cephaneyi de peşinden sürükleyerek üç kat merdiven çıktı ve gözlem alanına ulaştı. Burada önce silahın dipçiğiyle danışma görevlisini öldürdü, ardından merdiven aralığından çıkmakta olan iki turist ailesine ateş açtı, en sonunda da aşağıdaki insanlara gelişigüzel ateş etmeye başladı. Whitman, bir gece öncesinde daktilonun başına geçmiş ve bir intihar notu yazmıştı: Kendimi şu günlerde tam olarak anlayamıyorum. Aklı başında ve zeki bir genç olarak tanınmaktayım. Ama son zamanlarda (ne zaman başladığımı hatırlayamıyorum) birçok sıra dışı ve mantıksız düşüncenin kurbanı olmuş durumdayım. Saldırının haberi yayılırken Austin'deki bütün polis memurları da yerleşkeye yönlendirildi. Birkaç saat sonra üç memur ve hızla görevlendirilen bir vatandaş merdivenleri çıkmayı ve Whitman'i gözlem alanında öldürmeyi başardı. Whitman hariç on üç kişi öldürülmüş, otuz üç kişi de yaralanmıştı….Whitman'in cesedi morga götürüldü, kafatası kemik testeresiyle açıldı ve beyin çıkarıldı. Otopsi incelemesini yapan doktor, beyinde bozuk para büyüklüğünde bir tümör buldu. Gliyoblastom adı verilen bu tümör, talamus denilen yapının alt kısmından çıkıp hipotalamusa uzanıyor ve amigdala olarak bilinen üçüncü bir yapıyı sıkıştırıyordu. Amigdala, özellikle de korku ve saldırganlık merkezinde olmak üzere, duygu mekanizmasının düzenlenmesinden sorumludur. 1800’lerin sonlarına gelindiğinde, araştırmacılar amigdalanın hasar görmesiyle duygusal ve toplumsal rahatsızlıklar yaşandığını keşfetmişlerdi. 1930’lu yıllarda ise Heinrich Klüver ve Paul Bucy adlı biyologlar, amigdalası zarar gören maymunlarda korkusuzluk, duygusal körelme ve aşırı tepki gibi bir dizi belirti ortaya çıktığını gösterdiler. Amigdalası hasarlı dişi maymunların annelik davranışları bile bozuluyor, bu maymunlar sıklıkla yavrularını ihmal ediyor ya da onlara fiziksel tacizde bulunuyorlardı. Sağlıklı insanlarda ise amigdalanın etkinliği, özellikle ürkütücü yüzler gördüklerinde, korkulu anlar ya da toplumsal fobiler yaşadıklarında artar. Sonuçta Whitman’ın kendisiyle ilgili sezgileri -beynindeki bir şeylerin davranışlarını değiştirdiği- gerçekten de son derece isabetliydi. ‘Çok sevdiğim bu iki insanı da vahşice öldürmüş gibi göründüğümü tahmin ediyorum. Ama ben işi hızlı ve tam biçimde yapmaya çalıştım yalnızca. ... Eğer yaşam sigortası poliçem hâlâ geçerliyse lütfen borçlarımı ödeyin ... geri kalanını da ismimi vermeden bir akıl sağlığı kuruluşuna bağışlayın.’ Bu tür trajediler, belki de araştırmalar sonucunda önlenebilir. Whitman’daki değişimi fark eden başkaları da vardı. Yakın arkadaşı Elaine Fuess “Tümüyle normal göründüğünde bile, içindeki bir şeyleri denetlemeye çalıştığı izlenimini veriyordu” diye anlatmıştı. O “bir şeyler” tahminen Whitman’ın içindeki öfkeli, saldırgan zombi programlar topluluğuydu. Daha sakin ve akılcı olan taraflar, tepkisel, şiddete eğilimli taraflarla mücadeleyi sürdürse de tümörle gelen hasar dengeyi öyle bozmuştu ki, savaş artık adil olmaktan çıkmıştı…”
“...BEYNİ DEĞİŞTİR, SAHİBİ DE DEĞİŞSİN: YOKTAN VAR OLAN PEDOFİLLER, ARAKÇILAR VE KUMARBAZLAR / Whitman vakası münferit değildir. Nörobilimle hukukun arayüzü, beyin hasarının da devrede olduğu ve sayıları giderek artan vakalarla doludur. Beyni incelememize yardımcı olan daha iyi teknolojiler geliştikçe, daha fazla sayıda sorunun farkına varmaktayız. Burada Alex adını vereceğim kırk yaşındaki bir adamın hikâyesini ele alalım. Alex’in eşi Julia, onun cinsel tercihlerinde bir değişimin varlığını fark etmişti. Onu tanıdığı yirmi yıl boyunca ilk kez çocuk pornografisine ilgi duymaya başlamıştı. Üstelik öyle böyle bir ilgi de değildi bu. Bütün zamanını çocuk pornografisi sitelerine girip dergi toplayarak geçirmeye başlamış, bir masaj salonundaki genç bir kadından ilişki talebinde bulunacak kadar da ileriye götürmüştü işleri. Bu, daha önce kesinlikle yapmadığı bir şeydi. Evlendiği adamı artık tanıyamaz hale gelen Julia, ondaki bu davranış değişikliği karşısında korkmaya başlamıştı. Tüm bunlarla eşzamanlı olarak, artan baş ağrılarından şikâyet ediyordu Alex. Julia bunun üzerine onu bir aile hekimine götürdü, o da Alex’i bir nöroloğa yönlendirdi. Uygulanan beyin taramasında, beynin “orbitofrontal korteks” adı verilen bölgesinde büyük bir tümörün varlığı saptandı. Beyin cerrahları tümörü alındıktan sonra, Alex’in cinsel davranışları da normale döndü. Alex’in öyküsü, derin ve merkezi bir noktaya ışık tutmaktadır: Biyolojiniz değişince kararlarınız, istekleriniz ve tutkularınız da değişebilir. Doğal farz ettiğiniz güdüler (“Ben bir hetero/homoseksüelim,” “Çocuklar/yetişkinler beni çeker,” “Saldırgan/uysal bir yapım var,” vs.), aslında nöral mekanizmanın incelikli ayrıntılarıyla belirlenir. Bu tür güdüler merkezinde davranmanın genelde bir özgür seçim meselesi olduğu düşünülse de, kanıtlarla ilgili en üstünkörü inceleme bile bu varsayımın sınırlarını gözler önüne serer. Birazdan bununla ilgili başka örnekler de göreceğiz. Alex’in öyküsünden çıkarılacak dersin, daha sonraki beklenmedik gelişmelerle güçlendiğini görürüz. Geçirdiği beyin ameliyatından altı ay kadar sonra pedofilik davranışların yeniden kendini göstermeye başlaması üzerine, eşi onu yine doktora götürdü. Nöroradyolog, tümörün bir kısmının ameliyatta atlanmış olduğunu ve yeniden büyümeye başladığını keşfetti. Alex yeniden bıçak altına yattı. Kalan tümör parçasının da alınmasından sonra davranışları bir kez daha normale döndü. Alex’te aniden ortaya çıkan pedofili, gizli güdü ve arzuların kimi zaman toplumsallığın nöral çarkları arasında fark edilmeksizin gizlenmiş biçimde kalabileceğini gösterir. Alın lobu (frontal lob) hasar gördüğünde, insanlar dizginlerinden kurtulup beyinsel demokrasi içinde yer alan daha olumsuz unsurların varlığını gözler önüne sererler. Bu durumda Alex’in “özünde” bir pedofil ve yalnızca güdülerine direnmek için toplumsallaşmış olduğunu söylemek doğru olur mu? Belki de. Ama yine de etiketleri yapıştırmadan önce, kendi alın korteksiniz altında gizlenmiş bekliyor olabilecek yabancı alt programları bir gün keşfetmek isteyip istemeyeceğinizi düşünün…”
PARKİNSON İLACI ve KUMAR İLİŞKİSİ / “...2001 yılında Parkinson hastalarının aileleri ve bakıcıları, bir tuhaflık olduğunun farkına varmaya başladılar. Pramipeksol adlı ilacın verildiği hastalardan bir kısmı kumarbaza dönüşüyordu ; üstelik öylesine kumar oynayanlara değil, hastalıklı kumarbazlara. Daha önce kumara herhangi bir eğilim göstermemiş olan bu hastalar, artık düzenli biçimde Vegas’a uçar olmuşlardı. Altmış sekiz yaşındaki bir adam, ziyaret ettiği bir dizi kumarhanede altı ay içinde toplam 200 bin dolar tutarında para kaybetmişti. İnternet pokerine takılıp kalan kimi hastalar ise ödeyemeyecekleri kredi kartı borçlarının altında ezilmişti. Hastaların çoğu, bu kayıpları ailelerinden gizlemek için ellerinden geleni yapıyordu. Bu yeni bağımlılık, bazıları için kumarın da ötesine geçerek “zorlanımlı” (kompulsif) yeme alışkanlıklarına, alkol tüketimine ve aşırı cinselliğe kadar varmıştı…”
SSRI İLAÇ GRUBU / “...Düzinelerce başka sinirsel ileticinin (örneğin; serotonin) mutlak düzeyleri kendinizi nasıl biri olarak gördüğünüz konusunda kritik önem taşır. Eğer klinik depresyondan mustaripseniz, size reçete edilen ilaç, büyük olasılıkla seçici serotonin geri-alım baskılayıcısı (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor - SSRI) olarak bilinen ilaç grubunun bir üyesi olacaktır: fluoksetin, sertralin, paroksetin ya da sitalopram. Bu ilaçların etkilerini nasıl gösterdiğine dair bilmeniz gereken her şey “geri-alım baskılayıcısı” sözcüklerinde gizlidir: Normalde, “taşıyıcı” (transporter) olarak adlandırılan kanallar, nöronlar arası boşlukta bulunan fazla serotonini geri toplar; bu kanalların baskılanması, beyindeki serotonin düzeyinin artmasına neden olur. Artmış serotonin konsantrasyonu ise biliş (cognition) ve duygular üzerinde doğrudan etki gösterir. Bu ilaçları alanlar, öncesinde yatağın kenarına oturmuş ağlarken, şimdi ayağa kalkmış, duşunu almış, işini geri kazanmış ve yaşamındaki insanlarla yeniden sağlıklı ilişkiler kurmuş olarak bulabilirler kendilerini. Ve bunların hepsi de sinirsel iletici sistemleri üzerinde yapılan belli belirsiz bir ince ayar sayesindedir…”
ŞAKAK LOBU SARASI ve JEAN D’ARC / “...Sara nöbeti eğer şakak lobundaki (temporal lob) belirli bir noktada odaklanıyorsa, kişi motor nöbetler geçirmeyecek, daha üstü kapalı bir deneyim yaşayacaktır. Bir tür bilişsel nöbet olarak tanımlanabilecek bu etki, kişilik değişimleri, aşırı dinsellik (din saplantısı ve din konusunda kendinden aşırı emin olma), hipergrafi (genellikle de din olmak üzere belirli bir konuda aşırı derecede yazma isteği duyma), çevrede bir dışsal varlık olduğu yanılgısı ve sıklıkla da, tanrıya atfedilen sesler duyma gibi durumlarla kendini gösterir. Tarihte ortaya çıkmış peygamberler, kahramanlar ve liderlerin bir bölümünün şakak lobu odaklı sara hastaları olduğu düşünülmektedir." Baş melek Mikail’in İskenderiyeli Azize Katerina’nın, Azize Margaret'in ve Cebrail’in seslerini duyduğu konusunda hem kendisini hem de Fransız askerlerini ikna ederek on altı yaşındayken Yüz Yıl Savaşları’nın gidişatını değiştirmeyi başaran Jean D’Arc’ı düşünün. Kendisi, bu deneyimini şöyle anlatmıştı: “On üç yaşımdayken, Tanrı’nın, kendimi yönlendirmemde bana yardımcı olan sesini duydum. İlk seferinde çok korkmuştum. Ses bana öğle vakti duyurmuştu kendini. Mevsimlerden yazdı ve o sırada babamın bahçesindeydim.” Şöyle devam ediyordu: “Tanrı bana gitmemi emrettiğine göre gitmeliydim. Ve bu emri bana veren Tanrı olduğu için, yüz babaya ve yüz anneye sahip olsaydım ya da bir kralın kızı olsaydım bile giderdim yine de.” Geriye dönük kesin tanı koymak bu durumda olanaksız olsa da Jean D’Arc’ın sunduğu veriler, artan dindarlığı, süregiden sesler, şakak lobu sarası ile kesinlikle uyumludur. Beyin doğru noktada uyarıldığında, insan sesler duyar. Doktor, sara etkilerine karşı koyacak ilaçlar yazdığındaysa nöbetler ortadan kalkar, sesler kaybolur. Sonuçta gerçekliğimiz, biyolojimizin ne işler karıştırdığına bağlıdır…”
HUNTINGTON HASTALIĞI / “...Biyolojiye olan bağımlılığımıza son örnek olarak, tek bir gendeki küçük bir mutasyonun da davranışı belirleyip değiştirebileceğini söyleyelim. Alın korteksinde (frontal korteks) ilerleyerek gelişen bazı hasarların kişilik değişimlerine yol açtığı Huntington hastalığında saldırganlık, sekse aşırı düşkünlük (hiperseksüalite), dürtüsel ve toplumsal kuralları hiçe sayan davranışlar vb. belirtiler, fark edilmesi daha kolay spastik kol bacak hareketlerinden yıllar önce ortaya çıkar. Burada konumuz açısından asıl önemli nokta, Huntington hastalığının tek bir gende gerçekleşen bir mutasyonla ortaya çıktığıdır. Robert Sapolsky’nin özetlediği gibi “On binlerce gen arasından tek bir tanesindeki bir değişiklik, ömrün ortalarında bir yerde dramatik bir kişilik değişimiyle sonuçlanacaktır’.' Bu tür örnekler karşısında kimliğimizin özünün, biyolojimizin ayrıntılarına bağımlı olduğu dışında bir sonuca varabilir miyiz? Bir Huntington hastasına, özgür iradesini kullanıp böyle tuhaf davranmaktan vazgeçmesini söyleyebilir miyiz?...”
BEYNİMİZ TA KENDİMİZ / “...Maddeciliğin yanlış olduğunu söylemediğim gibi, yanlış olduğunu umduğumu bile söylemiyorum. Ne de olsa maddeci bir evren bile aklımızı başımızdan alacak kadar muhteşem ve ilginç olacaktır. Bir an için, moleküllerin bir araya gelip doğal seçilimin kurallarınca çoğalmalarından oluşan milyarlarca yıllık bir sürecin birer ürününden ibaret olduğumuzu düşünün: Dans edip duran milyarlarca hücrenin içinde sıvı ve kimyasalların aktığı yığınla yoldan oluşmuşuz yalnızca. İçimiz, paralel seyreden trilyonlarca sinaptik konuşmanın vızıltısından geçilmiyor; mikron ölçeğindeki devrelerden oluşmuş bu geniş yumurtamsı doku, modern bilimin hayal bile edemeyeceği algoritmalar kullanıyor ve bu nöral programlar da bizim kararlarımızın, aşklarımızın, tutkularımızın, korkularımızın ve isteklerimizin doğmasına yol açıyor. Bu, bana göre inanılmaz bir deneyim olurdu; kutsal kitaplarda savunulan her şeyden daha muhteşem bir deneyim. Bilimin şimdiki sınırları dışında yer alan ne varsa, hepsi de gelecek nesiller için açık birer soru konumundadır; isterse katı kurallı bir maddecilik olsun. Bu bile yeter de artar.
Evren, onu şimdiye kadar düşlemiş olduğumuzdan nasıl daha büyükse, bizler de iç gözlem yoluyla hissettiğimizden daha büyük birer varlığız. Şu sıralarda iç uzayın enginliğine ilk bakışlarımızı atmaktayız. Bu içsel, gizli ve yakın evrenin kendi hedeflerini, kendi gerekliliklerini ve kendi mantığını dayattığını görüyoruz. Beyin, kendimize yabancı hissettiğimiz, tuhaf bir organ olsa da, ayrıntılı devre örüntüleri içsel yaşantımızın manzarasına biçim verebiliyor. Ne inanılmaz, ne şaşırtıcı bir şaheserdir beyin. Ve bizler de ne şanslıyız ki, dikkatimizi ona yoğunlaştırmamıza olanak sağlayan teknoloji ve iradeye sahip bir neslin üyeleriyiz. Evrende keşfetmiş olduğumuz en harikulade şey bu: Beynimiz, yani ta kendimiz…”

[Isil Arican · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very simply narrated neuroscience book that explains some of the interesting neuroscientific phenomena. The writer has a easy to read style with many examples, and even though he does not go deep, he tells a lot about interesting things surrounding cognitive science. If I was a new reader to the area, probably I would have liked the book better and would give more stars. However, it was not very fulfilling for me, since I read a lot about on the same subject, and some of them were much better and more detailed.

Why 3 stars?

1. He explains some things in a too simplistic way. Again, good for the wow factor, not so good if you really are interested finding out whys. This level of simplicity also waters down some issues and as the writer jumps from conclusion to conclusion, it makes you think whether these were too premature.
2. Some of the research/ studies he cites are out of date. With the replicability crisis on cognitive science we know some of these studies are in fact poorly conducted and could not be replicated. Their conclusions are careless generalizations. And unfortunately lot of premises of the book relies on these premature non-asserted conclusions.

3. The last episode goes into a long tirade of bashing rationalist approach. The writer thinks that the materialist approach is overrated and it favors reductionism and advocate there might be more than what it seems to many phenomena. However, his attitude during the rest of the book contradicts his stance, since he takes many of the observational studies results as "facts". Also his examples for arguing against the materialism is faulty in my opinion. For example he gives an example of quantum physics as a proof that this approach does not work, since it contradicts the newtonian physics. I respectfully disagree, since this only proves that we thought we knew how matter was formed before, but now we know better with additional informations and observations. This does not disprove materialistic approach at all. Just because we updated what we knew with the new things we learned is not an argument against materialism or reductionism, it shows that our understanding how the world works improves with the new things we learn. In this last episode, it felt like he is invoking an "supernatural" explanation for some phenomena, beyond materialism.

4. His last episode also contradicts with an earlier episode he wrote regarding justice system. Even though he bashed materialism and criticizes Occam's Razor as being too reductionist, he does not shy away making hasty generalizations on how criminals should be treated based upon couple of examples he mentions in the book.

Overall, an entertaining book, but has some internal contradictions. Also do not wait for lot of depth, it is more like a compilation of popular cognitive science literature sprinkled with personal opinions on how we know what we know.

I listened this book while doing errands and driving, so it was not bad, But I am glad I did not sit down and spend time to read it.

Again, if it is your first introduction to neuroscience, it is a fun book, but take his conclusions with a grain of salt.

[Daniel Chaikin · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most enjoyable audio books I've listened to. Eagleman has me thinking about the mysterious and various parts of the brain, about how slow and inefficient our consciousness is and about how much goes on unconsciously, deep in the brain, and about all the odd things that happen to people because of tumors, strokes and brain injuries, and about how complex the brain is, and about how little we understand it (his analogy is that it is like studying earth from orbit in space).

He has another cool analogy on the unpredictability of true causes. He looks at a scientific analysis of a found, working radio and has the scientist study it, taking different pieces apart to discover how it works, and concluding the the wiring is the critical feature to make a radio talk and play music. How would one go from there to even considering radio waves. And that is science. The answers aren't around the corner, they are outside our current conceptual framework.

This also has me thinking about how little of the world we are able to sense, yet we have no concept of what we can't sense. Because what we do sense is our reality.

And about how we make a decision while different parts of our brain are battling against each other to lead us to the decision of that part. Each decision being the winner of multiple unconscious battles in the brain. And how little control we have over that.

There are, I imagine, many books like this. But Eagleman did a great of job getting me excited about all the information he had to share, and in audio form (he reads it himself), which means it's not too complicated to listen to, but also that reads very nicely.

[hayatem · Rating 5 out of 5]

"توجد اختلافات بيننا وبين أنفسنا بقدر ما يوجد من الاختلافات بيننا وبين الآخرين ."
—الكاتب الفرنسي ميشيل دي مونتين .

السؤال هو:
ما هي علاقة الجهاز العصبي بسلوك الإنسان ورسم واقعه ؟
و كيف يستقبل الدماغ المعلومات وكيف يغربلها لكي يجد الروابط أو الأنماط الجامعة بينها لتفسير هذا الواقع؟

يبحث إيجلمان في آخر ما وصل إليه العلم الحديث في علم الأعصاب العقلية، كما يقوم بجولة شاملة في العقل الإنساني بأبعاده المختلفة متقصياً في آلية عمل الدماغ وما خفي منه"اللاوعي"، عبر سبر الإدراكات التي لسنا واعين بها أو الإدراكات غير المحسوسة وأثرها في تشكيل قراراتنا وتوجيه تصرفاتنا.
يقول الفنان بِنك فلويد:
"ثمة شخص ما في رأسي ، لكنه ليس أنا! "

كما توغل في بحثه في طبيعة اللاشعور. مع تبيان الأسس العصبية للسلوك والذاكرة والإدراك .
يناقش إيجلمان أثر التجارب الحياتية في تشكيل أدمغتنا، والأسباب التي تجعلنا أكثر استعداداً لسلوك طريقة ما دون أخرى، من خلال عرض أمثلة و تجارب من المعاش اليومي، وأخرى علمية.

وظف إيجلمان، عدد من نظريات ومدارس علم النفس في بحثه ، ك علم النفس العصبي، وعلم النفس التطوري، في قياس وملاحظة و رصد العلاقة بين السلوك الإنساني و الجهاز العصبي للإنسان.

"الدماغ عالم ضخم يضاهي ضخامة الكون الذي ما زلنا نجهله، إنه من أكثر الأشياء دهشة وإثارة للإعجاب من كل ما اكتشفناه في الكون، ثم إنه نحن."— ديفيد إيجلمان

الكتاب عظيم للمهتمين بعلم الأعصاب السلوكية، والدراسات الأحيائية.

[د.أمجد الجنباز · Rating 5 out of 5]

كتاب جميل جدا، يطرح فكرة جديدة عن كيفية عمل الدماغ بشكل خارج عن ارادتنا

بالرغم من ان هذه الفكرة موجودة في كتب أخرى، لكن الكتاب بكامله يتمحور حول ذلك.

من الامثلة المذكورة
كيف يتحول مرضى بارنكنسون الذين يتعالجون بالأدوية إلى مدمنين على المقامرة
كيف يتسبب ورم صغير بالدماغ إلى تحويل الشخص إلى مجرم، أو حتى تغيير رغبته الجنسية وتحويله إلى متحرش بالأطفال

وهنا يخرج المؤلف بنتيجة مرعبة
وهي أننا لسنا مسؤلين عن الغالبية العظمى من من سلوكنا
وانما هي بسبب دماغنا، الذي جاءنا بالوراثة

وهنا يطرح قضية خطيرة في النهاية، وهي علينا محاسبة المجرمين على تصرفاتهم مع ان الدماغ هو المسؤول الأهم عنها

ومع اني اخالفه في ذلك تماما

إلا أن ذلك يطرح تساؤل رئيسي
فبما أن احدنا لديه نزعة لارتكاب بعض المعاصي أكثر من الآخر بسبب تركيبة دماغهم
فماهي الحدود والأسس التي سيحاسبنا الله عليها؟

لكني مطمئن بأن الله عادل حكيم، لا يظلم عنده أحد

[RKanimalkingdom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sublime. Absolutely Sublime.

I've said it time and time again that an outstanding book is one that leaves me speechless with incomprehensible gibberish being the only sounds you hear. After all, how can I summarize what is already so eloquently told by the book itself? It's an experience you must go through yourself.

Most of us are aware that our brain can be split simply into two parts; the conscious and the unconscious. But beyond that, do we consider anything? Do we even care? Surely the most important part of our brain is the part we use in our daily life, no?

Review Continued Here

[سامي · Rating 5 out of 5]

المراجعة المرئية رقم ١٠٨ في ظل كتاب:
‏ https://youtu.be/tapaDzSa9dA

يستخلص ديفيد إيجلمان في هذا الكتاب من خلال استعراض الأبحاث العلمية لدماغ الإنسان نتيجة خطيرة وهي أن قراراتنا ليست بالضرورة ناتجة عن وعي وشعور، بل هي قد تكون من اللاوعي واللاشعور الذي يتشكل في أدمغتنا بطريقة لا ندركها. فقراراتنا قد تشكلت وتكونت خارج وعينا وإدراكنا، فنحن في الحقيقة لم نتخذها، إنما اتخذها شخص آخر، اتخذه ذلك الدماغ الذي يحلل عوامل لا ندركها، بطريقة قد لا ندركها، وهو ما دفع بالمؤلف ليبدأ كتابه في الفصل الأول بعنوان: ثمة شخص في رأسي، لكنه ليس أنا.
ويحاول ديفيد إيجلمان، أن يذكر الحيوات السرية للدماغ، المسؤولة عن اختياراتنا وقراراتنا وإراداتنا من ناحية عصبية، الدماغ الذي يسير كدائرة كهربائية ترسل إشارات وتتلقى إشارات وتعالجها بطريقة لا ندركها.
يؤكد إيجلمان فكرته بالصلة التي وجدوها بين حالة الدماغ وبين قراراتنا وتصرفاتنا كالجريمة التي وقعت سنة 1966، حينما قتل رجل والدته وزوجته وأطلق الرصاص بشكل عشوائي على الناس ثم انتحر، ثم لما أخذت جثته وشرحت، وجدوا ورمًا في دماغه بحجم قطعة نقدية صغيرة ونما هذا الورم وضغط على منطقة مسؤولة عن تنظيم انفعالاتنا وعن وظيفة الخوف والعدوانية، بمعنى أن إرادته التي اتخذ من خلالها تصرفاته العدوانية قد تشكلت في دماغه بتأثير من هذا الورم.
وربما كان أكبر سؤال يمكن أن تطرحه تلك النتائج هو ما إذا كان للإنسان إرادة حرة، فنحن فيما يتعلق بالطبيعة والتنشيئة، لم نختر أيا منهما، كل واحد منا مركب من خطة وراثية ما وجئنا إلى عالم من الظروف التي لا نملك خيارًا فيها، و التفاعل بين الموروثات والبيئة هي ما شكلت خياراتنا وإراداتنا وتصرفاتنا، مما سيقودنا إلى سؤال آخر هو فيما لو كان سؤال استحقاق اللوم في الخطأ ممكنًا.
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📖 عدد الصفحات: ٣١٢
📊 التقييم النهائي: ٤.٥ من ٥

[Mohamed Metwally · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book, raising several questions that keep getting back to me from time to time, like who is really ME? and when I argue with myself, feeling a personal conflict over some decision, like eating a bar of Chocolate and some part of me says enjoy it!, while another part says you'll get fat!. At that time who is arguing with whom? and which of them is ME?

The book as mentioned in many reviews. represents the author's view, but this is the case in the second half of the book when he starts laying down his theories after stating many facts and valid arguments, explaining complex scientific stuff in layman terms.

Sometimes I agreed with him, had a different opinion in many issues, but enjoyed the argument as a whole

MiM

[Cem Binbir · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bilinçaltı dediğimiz kısmın, beynin işleyişinde aslında ne kadar baskın olduğunu örnekler ve araştırma sonuçlarıyla anlatan bir kitap. Bunun yanında, özellikle yakın zamanda edinilen çeşitli bilgiler üzerinden gelecekteki toplum yaşamına, suç, ceza ve adalet kavramlarına dair yorumlarda da bulunuyor yazar. Bu konularda bilimsel gündemi yakından takip ediyor, çokça makale / kitap okuyorsanız bu kitap size ilginç gelmeyebilir. Ama genel bir ilginiz var ve bilginizi arttırmak istiyorsanız faydalı olacaktır.

[Emre Turkmen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Doğan Cüceloğlu’nun da önerdiği bu kitabı herkes okumalı. Kitap bana çok şey öğretti👏👏

[A. Raca · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Gözleri belirli bir şeye dikmenin onu görmek anlamına gelmediğini ilk keşfedenler nörobilimciler değildi. Sihirbazlar durumun farkına çok daha önce varmış ve bu bilgiyi kullanıp geliştirmenin yollarını bulmuşlardı."

Neden daha önce mesafeli yaklaştığımı anlamadım.

💚

[Hani · Rating 5 out of 5]

اگه بخوام کتابی با خیال راحت معرفی کنم کسی با مغزش آشناتر بشه ،بفهمه اختیار توهمه،بفهمه واقعیتی که حس میکنه با واقعیت جهان بیرون چقدر متفاوته ،کتابای ایگلمنه و برای کسی که یکم تنبله مستندهاشو پیشنهاد میدم
اینکه بتونی کتابی بنویسی که هم کلی اطلاعات علمی داشته باشه هم فلسفه خلط شده باشه توش هم مغلطه نداشته باشه این وسطا ،کار هر کسی نیس دیدم که میگم
کلی کتاب پاپ ساینس شاهدمه که توی پرفروش بودن و مغلطه‌کاری استادن ولی این فرق داره
برای حسن ختام یه سندروم معرفی کنم
سندروم آنتون
در این بیماری چشم های فرد کاملا کوره و هیچ اطلاعات حسی به مدارهای مغزش تحویل داده نمیشه ولی اون مدلی از جهان پیرامون در ذهنش داره که توهم میزنه میبینه فرد دروغ نمیگه ولی تا وقتی که با اسباب و اثاثیه خونه برخورد نکنه باور نمیکنه نمیبینه چون ادراک حسی داره مثل چیزی که من از دنیا میبینم

دگ بقیه رو لو نمیدم اونایی که عاشق نوروساینس یا فلسفه ذهنن خودشون برن بخونن؛)

[Kalin · Rating 4 out of 5]

29 Оct 2014: Just finished editing the Bulgarian translation. My inner selves--as is their wont at the end of a road--are still in a jumble. A more coherent review coming soon. ;)

What I'd like to note right now is: this is another book I highly recommend to scientists and laymen alike. If you've ever struggled with questions such as "Telepathy? What do you mean, reading my mind? Am I supposed to have only one of them?" or "So who is the real me? The one who passionately believes in ahimsa and non-violence? Or the one who wants to beat all of you senseless, for being such a stupid, insensible bunch? Or the one who laughs on the sideline, high above and beyond?" (or with Occam's effing razor), Incognito has some answers for you.

Sorry ... I meant suggestions. ;)

~

20 Dec 2014: This hardly counts as coherent, but ... here goes:

https://choveshkata.net/forum/viewtop...

[Travis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do you believe in libertarian free will or Cartesian dualism? If so, David Eagleman’s Incognito will radically challenge your beliefs.

Incognito is probably the best work of nonfiction that I have read this year (2011), and it is also one of the best books on neuroscience that I have read in quite some time. Some of the material here has been presented elsewhere (if you have read works on neuroscience or consciousness by scientists and philosophers like Antonio Damasio, V. S. Ramachandran, Joseph Ledoux, Alva Noe, Patricia Churchland, and Daniel Dennett, much of the material in Incognito will be familiar to you), but Eagleman does an amazing job of showing how processes below the level of conscious awareness control much of our behavior and actually make us who we are.

One of the most frightening yet enlightening case studies that Eagleman discusses in this book is that of a man who had been married for twenty years and lived a normal, law-abiding life when, suddenly and unexpectedly, this man developed an intense interest in child pornography and even attempted to solicit sex from a very young prostitute: this middle-aged heterosexual man suddenly found that he was a pedophile (although he never actually raped a child). At the same time as his sexual appetites were changing, he also began having very bad headaches, so his wife took him to see a physician, and eventually he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. When the tumor was removed, both his headaches and his problem with pedophilia disappeared. About a year later, however, the headaches returned, and so did his sexual interest in children. He returned to the neurologist, and it was discovered that his original tumor had not been completely removed and had started growing again, and upon cutting out the tumor a second time, he again lost his sexual interest in children.

Another example of a tumor causing a sudden change in behavior that Eagleman discusses is that of, Charles Whitman, who in 1966 killed 16 people (and wounded 32 others) on the campus of the University of Texas. Prior to the shooting, Whitman’s behavior had begun to change dramatically, and he felt that something was wrong with him. In the suicide note he wrote before committing his mass murder, he asked that he be autopsied when he died. When an autopsy was carried out, a tumor was found to have been growing and pressing against his amygdala; the amygdala plays a key role in regulating aggression, fear, and social behavior. Whitman’s friends testified to the fact that, in the months leading up to the shooting, he had not really been himself. Whitman himself wrote, in his suicide note, that he no longer felt like himself and that he was struggling with violent urges that he could no longer control. Had he not had this tumor, it is almost certain that Whitman would not have become a killer.

Eagleman presents numerous other examples which show that our behavior and personalities are determined to a much greater extent by physiological and chemical processes than the ordinary layperson might think. However, Eagleman also pays due respect to the effects of the environment in which we live as a factor in shaping our very selves, but as he points out, we can no more control the environment in which we find ourselves than we can control the physiological and chemical processes that cause our brains to grow and change.

This book is not meant to be an argument against free will. It is not a philosophical treatise. What it is is a fascinating synthesis of the biological basis of the self and of consicousness. I highly, highly recommend it.

[Salem Albusaeedi · Rating 4 out of 5]

العقل اللاواعي
من منظور علمي هذه المرة

كانت المقاربة علمية صرفة في الفصول الأولى
ثم أخذ الكتاب ينحو منحاً فكرياً قبل النهاية
وشعرت حينها أن الكاتب وقع في مغبة النظرة المادية كما هو معتاد في الأوساط العلمية

لكنه أدهشني في الخاتمة بحديثه عن إشكاليات النظرة المادية والإختزالية
بأوضح ما يكون البيان


عموما الكتاب شيق والترجمة متقنة
وأتطلع لقراءة أعمال أخرى للمؤلف وللمترجم

4.5/5

[Jaylia3 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This very interesting and thought provoking book by neuroscientist David Eagleman is a little disorienting. After all, based on the numerous observations and scientific experiments he details Eagleman’s conclusion is that we have no freewill. I may think I am considering options, making decisions, and choosing, for instance, what book to read, but according to scientists who study these things I am not in charge, if by “I” what I mean is the “I” that I know--my conscious mind. It’s not surprising that drugs, alcohol, brain injury, and evolutionary forces exert power over us that we are not always aware of while it is going on, but according to the science Eagleman reports there is more to it than that. In an experiment in which people were asked to lift their fingers at the time of their choosing, the conscious brain impulse to move was preceded by unconscious brain activity.

Is this proof that the conscious decision to move a finger is governed by the unconscious mind? I’m not sure. And if it is proof, would that carry over into every kind of decision? Does the unconscious mind really have invisible, almost god-like power over every thought and action?

While I am not convinced that the freewill/determinism question has been fully answered--neuroscience is still a very young field of knowledge--the first five chapters of Incognito are full of fascinating, persuasive examples that demonstrate how the reality we perceive with our conscious minds bears sometimes only a rough resemblance to what is actually happening. When reading Incognito I frequently broke off to share these examples with whoever was around me. There are illustrations you can try yourself, for instance there is a graphic that allows you to prove to yourself that your eyes have a blind spot, a gap in vision that your unconscious brain fills in based on what is probably there.

In the final chapters of Incognito Eagleman uses the latest information from brain science to draw logical but sometimes counterintuitive and unsettling conclusions about the future of the justice system. With little or no freewill, what should society do with criminals? Since the unconscious operates on a “team of rivals” model in which conflicting impulses struggle for control, Eagleman would have incarceration based on the neuroplasticity of the offender—that is on how likely it is that the criminal’s brain could respond to reconditioning techniques. Those who could be reconditioned so that they would no longer cause damage to society would be; those who couldn’t be reconditioned because of frontal lobe impairment or other brain defects would be warehoused.

Even though neuroscience is still in its infancy there is a lot of riveting information here about how the brain works. You don’t have to agree with all the conclusions Eagleman draws in this book for it to be worth reading. Incognito is a great book for sparking deep and engaging discussions.

[Cassandra Kay Silva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow what a surprise this one was! A must read!

[Myth · Rating 1 out of 5]

Disclaimer: I have not actually finished this book and do not know if I will.

As someone who's very interested in neurology this book does have it's good moments, but they're largely eclipsed by a bunch of dumbing down.

I don't blame Eagleman, I know it's people in the publishing industry who probably pushed this book to be like this. Following is my reaction to each element I found annoying. There's a summary at the end.

Dumbing it down: Too much repetition and unnecessary metaphors. I do not know how many times I have to be told the same thing in different configurations in two to three pages. Okay, I get it. I took the information at face value the first time it was said.

Generalizations: Eagleman makes a ton of sweeping generalizations. I know generalizations are easy, but they're inaccurate and more fit for a marketing campaign than a book. I know Eagleman knows this, because there are times when he takes the more cautious approach and then follows it up with more generalizations. Generalizations lead to assumptions that are not necessarily true, if at all. It's pop-science at it's "best."

Language: The writing style in this book bounces around. There are sections I don't mind, but the use of "you" is incredibly obnoxious. Obviously Eagleman doesn't know the sort of audience he may have, who may think in this rare way, have this condition and so on. The usage of "you" is yet again something more suited to advertisements than books (unless it's self-help.)

Examples/Excersizes: These are so annoying. For one, not all of them will work on an ebook and two, not all of them will work period. This is not a children's textbook, so I don't understand why there are these childish little games. A normal person can reason that the information is true without having the mind games they published in Highlights in the 90s. Not all them work either, for reasons that are covered in the book.

For instance, finding your blind spot. I'm aware I have a blind spot, but the little test didn't work at all and for a simple reason, I know the object/dot is there. Everyone I tried the test on (mostly family members) couldn't get the spot to go away and turn into background fuzz either. Why exactly is it assumed that the mind would turn a spot into background fuzz anyway (even though you shouldn't be able to technically see either?) Why wouldn't some brains simply fill in the dot?

Sources: I took both psychology and media studies in college. I was rarely impressed by my psychology classes. Few actually rely on current information or on experimentation. It's expensive to conduct experiment, but way more reliable. The people who really understand the way the typical person thinks are in marketing and media studies. They stay far more up-to-date and have the money and motivation to do studies. Eagleman relies heavily on psychology which bothers me. A lot of what is known in abnormal psychology is from neurology and from brain injury. Of course there are the therapies that are shown to work, but the ideas surrounding the typical person's psyche seem to be frequently bias and out-of-date.

For instance, Eagleman write about what is basically subliminal messages. Images that are displayed too quickly for the conscious mind to process. There's a ton of research that shows that subliminal messages don't work and that message can't be processed without conscious recognition. This is why subliminal messages aren't used in media anymore and we should be skeptical of any study using such a method. We also have to note that there are layers to our consciousness and it's not as simple as Eagleman writes it to be. Again, I assume he knows this and has dumbed it down.

Aside from the fact that subliminal messages have never been proven to work, it was found in studies that a message followed up too quickly by another message would push out the last one. Basically, make us forget what we just saw - in studies where they flash faces to figure out if someone is racist (or whatever) we probably are consciously processing what we're seeing, but we're not given much time to make a decision. In another example people picked out words that were flashed, we do process them, but if they happen too quickly it can make our memories more fuzzy and incoherent than normal so we'll remember random things.

Studies like this are very prone to human error, bias and I don't have much faith in them. Soft sciences are squishy and should act sponge-like, but are too often isolated and cemented. People in the hard sciences understand the purposes of science and one of those is change.

Additionally, the psychology reveals biases, sexist notions and homophobic culture, which is probably only normal for studies taken from 50 to 100 years ago. Does our species reproduce with the use of two specialized sexes? Yes, but does that mean we're wired entirely just for sex for the sake of sex. No, we're a social species and we rely on community. There are other mammal that get what they want without being the least bit polite to the other they are trying to fornicate with. A zoologist knows more about mammal behavior than an evolutionary psychologist. I wouldn't be surprised if hospital doctors, emergency room workers and proctologists know more about typical human behavior than a psychologist.

Studies of other apes have shown sex to be a social behavior that strengthens community. There's also theories in other fields about why there'd be bisexuals (it seems specifically bisexual woman and maybe a sense of community among females to raise children.) In this book human sexuality and attraction is grossly oversimplified (at least as far as I've read.) If we were so hardwired to attractive and healthy people it shouldn't go against our ethical instincts to say "We should 'fix' ugly, sick people and only let beautiful healthy people reproduce." There's also some hypothesis about us being attracted to what we're most familiar with (which is usually our own appearance) so we'll look for people with appearances that remind us of ourselves (or perhaps our parents.) This would explain our notions about people being well matched or looking good together and beauty in the eye of the beholder.

tl:dr - Book is dumbed down, uses too many generalizations and has some suspect and inaccurate information.

I don't know if I can finish this book. The information is not delivered in a fast-paced or intellectual way and, as such, is not really my style. I'll take my chances with Scientific American over this.

[Kalin]

Отзивът ми (на английски) е при оригинала. Тук само ще кажа, че горещо препоръчвам книгата, ако се интересувате от начините, по които работи мозъкът ни. Тя съдържа множество неочевидни, а пораждащи челопляс наблюдения. Аз не съм се чувствал толкова мотивиран да си преосмисля мозъка ;) от „Мисленето“ на Канеман насам.

Добавка от 20.12.2017: избрани любими откъси в блога ми.