The secret life of the mind how your brain thinks, feels, and decides by mariano sigman

Copyright Copyright © 2015 by Mariano Sigman English translation © 2017 by Mariano Sigman Cover design by Daniel Rembert Cover artwork by Shutterstock Author photograph by BGH 100 años de innovación; Peral-Wolf Cover © 2017 Hachette Book Group, Inc Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com Thank you for your support of the author’s rights Little, Brown and Company Hachette Book Group 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104 littlebrown.com twitter.com/littlebrown facebook.com/littlebrownandcompany First ebook edition: June 2017 Originally published in Buenos Aires and Barcelona by Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, S.A in 2015 First North American Edition: June 2017 Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events To find out more, go to hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591 The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher Text here from The Simpsons, Season 2, Episode 12, “The Way We Was,” written by Al Jean & Mike Reiss and Sam Simon, originally aired January 31, 1991 © Fox Broadcasting Company All rights reserved ISBN 978-0-316-54961-5 E3-20170524-JV-PC CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction 1: The origin of thought How babies think and communicate, and how can we understand them better? The genesis of concepts Atrophied and persistent synaesthesias The mirror between perception and action Piaget’s mistake! The executive system The secret in their eyes Development of attention The language instinct Mother tongue The children of Babel A conjecturing machine The good, the bad and the ugly He who robs a thief… The colour of a jersey, strawberry or chocolate Émile and Minerva’s owl I, me, mine and other permutations by George Transactions in the playground, or the origin of commerce and theft Jacques, innatism, genes, biology, culture and an image 2: The fuzzy borders of identity What defines our choices and allows us to trust other people and our own decisions? Churchill, Turing and his labyrinth Turing’s brain Turing in the supermarket The tell-tale heart The body in the casino and at the chessboard Rational deliberation or hunches? Sniffing out love Believing, knowing, trusting Confidence: flaws and signatures The nature of optimists Odysseus and the consortium we belong to Flaws in confidence Others’ gazes The inner battles that make us who we are The chemistry and culture of confidence The seeds of corruption The persistence of social trust To sum up… 3: The machine that constructs reality How does consciousness emerge in the brain and how are we governed by our unconscious? Lavoisier, the heat of consciousness Pyschology in the prehistory of neuroscience Freud working in the dark Free will gets up off the couch The interpreter of consciousness ‘Performiments’: freedom of expression The prelude to consciousness In short: the circle of consciousness The physiology of awareness Reading consciousness Observing the imagination Shades of consciousness Do babies have consciousness? 4: Voyages of consciousness (or consciousness tripping) What happens in the brain as we dream; is it possible for us to decipher, control and manipulate our dreams? Altered states of consciousness Nocturnal elephants The uroboros plot Deciphering dreams Daydreams Lucid dreaming Voyages of consciousness The factory of beatitude The cannabic frontier Towards a positive pharmacology The consciousness of Mr X The lysergic repertoire Hoffman’s dream The past and the future of consciousness The future of consciousness: is there a limit to mind-reading? 5: The brain is constantly transforming What makes our brain more or less predisposed to change? Virtue, oblivion, learning, and memory The universals of human thought The illusion of discovery Learning through scaffolding Effort and talent Ways of learning The OK threshold The history of human virtue Fighting spirit and talent: Galton’s two errors The fluorescent carrot The geniuses of the future Memory palace The morphology of form A monster with slow processors Our inner cartographers Fluorescent triangles The parallel brain and the serial brain Learning: a bridge between two pathways in the brain The repertoire of functions: learning is compiling Automatizing reading The ecology of alphabets The morphology of the word The two brains of reading The temperature of the brain 6: Educated brains How can we use what we have learned about the brain and human thought to improve education? The sound of the letters Word-tied What we have to unlearn The framework of thought Parallelawhat? Gestures and words Good, bad, yes, no, OK The teaching instinct Spikes of culture Docendo discimus Epilogue Acknowledgements About the Author Appendix Bibliography Newsletters ** The ‘as if’ here is literal The visual cortex doesn’t speak in English with the parietal cortex But these metaphors help us to understand how certain mechanisms work, as long as they are not too exaggerated or distracting * When the celebrated world chess champion José Raúl Capablanca was asked how many plays he calculated, he replied: ‘Just one, the best one.’ * Luis Pescetti suggests that how natural a food is can be determined by counting the number of syllables in its name Apple, peach, zucchini–all natural foods have fewer than five syllables * Try to read the following sentence backwards: ‘A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.’ It’s a quite awkward way of saying the same thing, isn’t it? ** CAPTCHA is an acronym (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) for an automated process that separates humans from machines They are those drawn and camouflaged words that we have to type in to many transactions on the Internet Since computers cannot read these images, when we write them we are opening a lock only humans have the key to * In English, syllables usually have a complex structure In Spanish and Italian, on the other hand, the simple consonant-vowel structure is frequent, and it is even more common in Japanese That is why the Japanese have such difficulty pronouncing, when they appear in other languages, syllables ending in a consonant, saying ‘aiscrimu’ and ‘beisoboru’ for ice cream and baseball * And champagne * This was clearly and concisely expressed by Jorge Luis Borges in Funes the Memorious ‘Not only did he struggle to understand that the generic symbol dog covered so many disparate individuals of diverse sizes and diverse shapes; it bothered him that the dog from three fourteen (seen in profile) had the same name as the dog from three fifteen (seen head on) His own face in a mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time […] I nevertheless suspect that he was not very capable of thought Thinking is forgetting differences, it is generalizing, abstracting.’ * John Lennon knew something about this: ‘Because the world is round it turns me on.’ * Although most likely that conversation never happened It is a myth invented in modernity that all those in medieval times believed that the earth was flat Aristotle had already proven that the earth is spherical, and everyone accepted it (Eratosthenes even measured its size) It was something that any medieval person who was averagely educated knew It is an incredibly widespread modern invention that Columbus was the bold one who wanted to try to prove that This story is told in Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians by J Russell (New York, Praeger, 1997) * This was the word problem You can rewrite it and you’ll see how much easier it is to solve ‘The floors of a building are numbered from to 25 The building’s elevator has only two buttons, one yellow and one green When the yellow button is pressed it goes up floors, and when the green button is pressed, it goes down floors If the yellow button is pushed when there are not enough floors above, the elevator will not move, and the same thing happens when the green button is pushed and there aren’t enough floors below Write a sequence of buttons that will allow a person to go up from floor to 11 in the elevator.’ And this is my translation, written almost in code, which allowed me to solve it much more easily without uselessly saturating my memory buffer:Elevator: up or down 7.Building: 25 floors.You cannot go past the ground level or the roof.How can you get from to 11? * It’s fabulous that these two extraordinary Hungarians, who revealed the mysteries of human communication, are linked, in that the last name of one is the first name of the other Now we need a record by the singers Luis Miguel and Miguel Mateos, and the now impossible trio of Boy George, George Michael and Michael Jackson * Ironically, ‘teaching’ and ‘cheating’ are anagrams Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Hachette Digital To receive special offers, bonus content, and news about our latest ebooks and apps, sign up for our newsletters Sign Up Or visit us at hachettebookgroup.com/newsletters ... morphology of the word The two brains of reading The temperature of the brain 6: Educated brains How can we use what we have learned about the brain and human thought to improve education? The sound of. .. pushing the button with their head Then the child sits on their mother’s lap and pushes the button with their hands It is the same baby that, upon seeing the actor the same thing but with their hands... the actor, they would the same But if, on the other hand, they are capable of thinking logically, they will understand that the actor pushed it with their head because their hands were full and,