Incognito is a book about all the stuff that goes on in our brain behind the scenes that we are unaware of. One main theme is that our conscious perception of the world only captures a very small fraction of our brain processes - both in reference to external events, but also even internal processes. Another main theme is that even though our conscious experience is unified, our brain is not - and there is often competition between its parts.
The beginning of the book convinces us that there is something going on within us that we are unaware of. This is demonstrated through our ability to act before consciously perceiving something, or hearing our name in a conversation that we weren't listening to, or by finding people attractive or making choices without really knowing the reason.
Eagleman also makes some important points about conscious experience relating to its constructed nature. First, he links conscious experience directly to the concept of attention and secondly, he shows us that a lot of conscious reality is hallucinated. For example, we all have blindspots in our eyes where the optic nerve is located on the retina, but we do not perceive the spot.
He also talks about how the brain is quite plastic and can learn to make sense of new ways of sensing.
As the book progresses, Eagleman tries to make us not only aware of how much that goes on under the hood that we don't know about, but also how impressive it is. He draws comparisons to robots and AI, which at the time the book was written was really struggling - even in fairly simple tasks like computer vision or walking across a street - tasks that seem trivially easy for humans. These tasks become easy through an efficient learning process, and he talks about how skills transition from difficult to easy and also how we seem inherently biased to things that are familiar.
Then Eagleman develops the idea about different parts of our brain being in competition with each other. He gives the example of Mel Gibson's racism and subsequent retraction as an example of this sort of competition, and identifies some core competitive processes: short-term vs. long-term goals, internally oriented vs. externally oriented processes, which maps onto emotional vs. rational processes.
So what can we practically take away from this news - that we are vastly disconnected from the majority of our brain processes, that we become aware of those processes only after the fact, and that parts of our brain are in competition with each other? All this evidence looks bad for conscious free-will, and Eagleman argues from a point of sort of practical grace with how we should respond to negative behaviors. He thinks our tendency as humans to assign blame - either 'someone did something' or instead, 'their brain did something' and thinking punitively about assigning punishment in accordance to blame is the wrong approach. Instead we should be looking for ways to positively shape future behavior.
Discussion Questions
David Eagleman's approach to "rehabilitation" instead of punishment brings up the question of what constitutes rehab when it is coercive, and where to ethically draw the line. For instance, most of us in the West, are appalled by the "re-education" internment camps in China, which we find unjust. If they are effective at readmitting citizens in a way that the culture finds acceptable, the practice seems closer to Eagleman's rehab than our punishment-focused prisons. Yet, something about changing someone's values so drastically from who they were with coercive methods seems darker to me. Is there away around this? Where should society draw a line?
If a simple pill existed that would immediately turn a murdering rapist into an exemplary citizen, would you be satisfied with mandatory pill-taking as the only consequence to the murderer/rapist?
A major theme of the book is how little your conscious self is in touch with your unconscious self, and thus how little control you have over your perceptions and actions. Yet, there seems to be some variance between people in how in-tune and in-touch we are. Do you think that we should have a responsibility to increase our awareness and control in order to take more responsibility for our lives and actions?
Given that consciousness gives us watered down, inaccurate presentations of reality - not even in real-time, but after the fact, why in the world do you think that it exists? What is its function? To allow us to deploy attention?
DNA plays a role in our destinies. Eagleman sort of pushes back on this, stating that of course we are constrained and tied to our biology somewhat, but that the other variables that influence our behavior are so innumerable that it is extremely difficult to predict our destinies. But this book was written in 2011. Do you basically agree with him, or do you think that nature plays a larger role and why?
Have you ever had an experience where you did something or felt attracted to something but didn't know why?