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Your brain creates your sense of self, incognito

Liz Else, associate editor


(Image: Liliya Gabdrakhmanova/Flickr/Getty)

Close your eyes. Imagine you're in a car, and you want to change from the left lane to the right lane (reverse depending on where you are trying this). Mime what you would do.

Oops, you probably just ended up on the pavement! (*scroll down for an explanation of what you likely did to mow down those imaginary pedestrians)

But why do we make mistakes like this? How come something that feels like second nature to drivers goes wrong when you try to consciously enact it?

There's the rub, and the nub of how our brains work, according to David Eagleman. This neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, where he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action and the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law, is a rising star: the only neuroscientist on the planet whose first foray into speculative fiction (Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives) became both a publishing phenomenon and a musical version by Brian Eno.

His popular science book, Wednesday is Indigo Blue was also well received, and he hit on the cute idea of publishing his next work Why the Net Matters, as an app for the iPad rather than a physical book. Duly impressed, The New York Times Magazine described it as a "superbook", meaning books with "so much functionality that they're sold as apps".

The downside to all this praise - no matter if it is deserved or not - is that it is bound to jack up the expectations for future books. So much so that the publishers of Incognito: The secret lives of the brain must have felt bound to blazon pre-digested praise from another rising star, Jonah Lehrer, across the cover: "A stunning exploration of the We behind the I".

But they had no need for such hype: Incognito stands in its own right as a fun read by a smart person for smart people. He lures his readers with big questions using topical examples, ranging from "If the drunk Mel Gibson is an anti-Semite and the sober Mel Gibson authentically apologetic, is there is a real Mel Gibson?" to "What do Ulysses and the subprime mortgage market have in common?" and "Why are people whose names begin with J more likely to marry other people whose names begin with J?"  

All of this is designed to probe and eventually destroy any residue of an unexamined, if presistent, sense of "I" that enables most of us to believe we are in charge of our senses, our thoughts and feelings. As Eagleman rightly observes:


Eagleman is especially interesting on the issue of "dethronement": where the emerging understanding of the brain shifts us from an intuitive sense of being at the centre of things, to being far out at the edge. So what happens then? How are we to think of ourselves? As a "parliament of pieces and parts and subsystems," says Eagleman, a democratic team of rivals.

Aside from that somewhat tricksy analogy, Eagleman is keen to avoid reductionist traps: the future of understanding the mind will not be down to neurons alone but much more to do with "deciphering patterns of activity that live on top of the wetware, patterns that are directed both by internal machinations and by interactions from the surrounding world". As for the biggest puzzle of all - how to understand the relationship between physical matter and subjective experience   we call consciousness - the jury (in the shape of the world's top labs) is still out.

In all, there is little that is truly new here. Incognito will ultimately take its place on the huge shelf of books bidding to shed light on how our brains' billions of neurons and neuronal connections conjure any sort of world for embodied creatures like us to live in. Eagleman joins a great tradition of science popularisers, ranging (at random among the great and good) from Chris Frith (Making up the Mind) through Susan Greenfield (The Human Brain: A Guided Tour and The Private Life of the Brain) to just about everything by the late, great Richard Gregory.

Like them, Eagleman is of his time. And this will perhaps turn out to be Incognito's greatest virtue: it will attract a new generation to ponder their inner workings and serve as a contemporary important reminder that when it comes to the "reality" the brain serves up, we must stay alert, trust nothing and hope for better research of every sort to reconfigure now our all but defunct sense of self.

*Most of us hold the steering wheel straight, then turn to the right for a moment, then straightened it out again. What you should have done is to turn the wheel to the right, then back through the centre, and turn the wheel as far to the left side as to the right - only then straightening out. Lucky we were only miming then...

Book Information
Incognito: The secret lives of the brain
by David Eagleman
Canongate Books Ltd
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