Mariano Sigman - The Secret Life of the Mind - How Our Brain Thinks, Feels and Decides

William Collins

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London SE1 9GF

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017

Copyright © 2015 Mariano Sigman

Copyright © 2015, Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, S. A. Buenos Aires

Copyright © 2015, Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial,

S. A. U. Travessera de Gracia, 47–49. 08021 Barcelona

English translation © Mariano Sigman 2017

Text on p.84 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.

Mariano Sigman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008210922

Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008210939

Version: 2018-05-30

‘To read minds nowadays, one doesn’t need to be a magician or clairvoyant. As science takes leaps and bounds towards understanding the mysteries of consciousness, Mariano Sigman, one of the most notable neuroscientists of today, has written a book on just this subject’

Revista Nueva

‘The brain is the star of this book, with chapters focusing on its characteristics throughout childhood and youth, identity, decision-making, consciousness, education and its capacity to transform itself. In exploring the psychological element of neuroscience, Mariano Sigman tells the story of the human mind as a journey through some of the least travelled paths of mankind … A wonderful read’

La Nacion

‘Sigman confirms that although we are capable of detecting and manipulating consciousness, science is still not able to physically break it down. The idea of the mind as a tabula rasa is only one of many erroneous notions that Sigman’s brilliant book helps to correct’

El Cultural, El Mundo

‘What makes The Secret Life of the Mind a great read is Sigman’s solid capacity as a scientific storyteller’

Clarin

‘In his latest publication, Sigman takes readers on a new journey into their own minds. This introspective journey attempts to access the deepest parts of our brain, where maybe even the secret of human essence lies’

RTVE

‘What differentiates The Secret Life of the Mind from other books about the mind is that it takes on neuroscience from a psychological point of view, as well as taking into account psychoanalysis, behavioural economics and philosophy’

Nosotras

‘Sigman takes us on an entertaining journey through the brain to show us how we make decisions, how we feel and how we think’

El Confidencial

‘ The Secret Life of the Mind proposes a journey similar to that undertaken by Carl Sagan in Cosmos aboard his vessel of knowledge, but in this case through our inner universe’

Federico Kukso, Le Monde diplomatique

To Milo and Noah

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Introduction

1: The origin of thought

How do 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