Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (Reader's Notes and Reflection)
Who am I?
This is one of the ambiguous questions that has the potential to initiate an existential crisis, asking you to evaluate what kind of person you are, what kind of person you want to become, and if you're actually in control of your own fate.
David Eagleman links this question to a deeper exploration of our brains - both the parts we know about and the vast amount of parts we don't know about.
What is the difference between the brain and the mind? And where, in that strange, unknown jumble of neural connections and electrochemical reactions is our "self" located? Does it make sense to call my conscious self my "true self"? What about the rest of that huge iceberg that's hidden underwater - the subconscious?
Like most other readers (according to Goodreads reviews), I found this book incredibly intriguing and surprisingly entertaining.
Even though Eagleman is talking about complex concepts - brain structures, synesthesia, visual illusions, and artificial intelligence - and throwing a bunch of cognitively dissonant ideas at us (thanks to AP Psych for that vocab), he manages to communicate his ideas in a way that people who aren't neuroscientists can understand.
That's a problem that pops up for many scientists and people who are doing research in their respective fields.... they might be the most excited person in the world when it comes to their findings, but if they can't find a way to successfully translate their scientific mumbo-jumbo into layman's terms, then no one is going to be able to understand what they're talking about, much less develop that level of excitement.
Eagleman manages to merge science with commonplace ideas and examples, using metaphor to convey the significance of this idea that "we aren't our self".
I had already read up on the structure/function of the brain, so it was so cool to be able to understand Eagleman when he was talking about structures like the limbic system or concepts like perceptual switching.
I've been trying to improve my active reading, so I've been annotating and taking notes as I go through each selected chapter.
NOTES
Quotes and Questions:
Can we have original thoughts? If all our thoughts and ideas are a culmination of things we've heard/seen before, then is creativity really a thing?
This book made me curious about the nature of creativity - how do our brains make those random connections between seemingly irrelevant ideas?
