Book Review: Incognito - The Secret Lives of the Brain
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Throughout the book, there are frequent jumps in areas such as philosophy, romance, science fiction, quantum physics, literature. Thus, the subject is covered in a wide variety of angles. While studying consciousness in the book, on the other hand, we are basically focusing on how unconscious evolutionary systems are. The book also mentions that humans are more or less conscious zombie-like vending machines than being very conscious beings.
Most people think that the field of vision is unlimited. On the contrary, this is wrong. Imagine that our visual field is not limited. Just look for a spot on the wall opposite you, stretch your arm and move your fingers. Now move your hand slowly backward, toward your ears. After a certain point you will not be able to see your fingers. Your fingers will reappear when you bring your hand forward again. So, what we do is actually exceeding the limits of the field of vision.
There are some very interesting information and perspectives in the book. We suppose we take our decisions, but is that really so? The book starts with this questioning and in the last pages it examines the issue of responsibility from the point of view of crime and punishment.
The book often talks about how the brain works, the role of consciousness and subconscious in our lives. The fact that the book is scientific may wake up the impression that it may be a heavy book. However, David Eagleman has facilitated understanding of every detail he wanted to describe as exemplify. An impressive book that I would strongly recommend.
“Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
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