The Secret Life of the Mind Read online

  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.

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  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

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  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 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

  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

  To Milo and Noah

  INTRODUCTION

  I like to think of science as a ship that takes us to unknown places, the remotest parts of the universe, into the inner workings of light and the tiniest molecules of life. This ship has instruments, telescopes and microscopes, which make visible what was once invisible. But science is also the route itself, the binnacle, the chart leading us towards the unknown.

  My voyage over the last
twenty years, between New York, Paris and Buenos Aires, has been into the innermost parts of the human brain, an organ composed of countless neurons that codify perception, reason, emotions, dreams and language.

  The goal of this book is to discover our mind in order to understand ourselves more deeply, even in the tiniest recesses that make up who we are. We will look at how we form ideas during our first days of life, how we give shape to our fundamental decisions, how we dream and how we imagine, why we feel certain emotions, how the brain transforms and how who we are changes along with it.

  Throughout these pages we will see the brain from a distance. We will go where thought begins to take shape. And it is there where psychology meets neuroscience. This is the ocean in which many people of varied disciplines have sailed, including biologists, physicists, mathematicians, psychologists, anthropologists, linguists, philosophers, doctors. As well as chefs, magicians, musicians, chess masters, writers, artists. This book is a result of that amalgam.

  The first chapter is a journey to the land of childhood. We will see that the brain is already prepared for language long before we begin to speak, that bilingualism helps us to think, and that early on we form notions of what is good and what is fair, and about cooperation and competition, that later affect how we relate to ourselves and others. This early intuitive thinking leaves lasting traces on the way we reason and decide.

  In the second chapter we will explore what defines the blurry, fine line between what we are willing to do and what we aren’t. Those decisions that make us who we are. How do reason and feelings work together in social and emotional decisions? What makes us trust others and ourselves? We will discover that small differences in decision-making brain circuits can drastically change our way of deciding, from the simplest decisions to the most profound and sophisticated ones that define us as social beings.

  The third and fourth chapters travel into the most mysterious aspect of thought and the human brain–consciousness–through an unprecedented meeting between Freud and the latest neuroscience. What is the unconscious and how does it control us? We will see that we can read and decipher thoughts by decoding patterns of brain activity, even in vegetative patients who have no other way to express themselves. And who is it that awakens when consciousness awakens? We will see the first sketches of how we can now record our dreams and visualize them within some sort of oneiric planetarium, and explore the fauna of different states of consciousness, like lucid dreams and thinking under the effects of marijuana or hallucinogenic drugs.

  The last two chapters cover questions of how the brain learns in different circumstances, from everyday life to formal education. For example, is it true that learning a new language is much harder for an adult than for a child? We will take a journey into the history of learning, looking at effort and ability, the drastic transformation that takes place in the brain when we learn to read, and the brain’s predisposition to change. This book outlines how all this knowledge can be used responsibly to improve the largest collective experiment in the history of humanity: school.

  The Secret Life of the Mind is a summary of neuroscience from the perspective of my own experience. I look at neuroscience as a way to help us communicate with each other. From this perspective, neuroscience is another tool in humanity’s ancestral search to express–sometimes rudimentarily–the shades, colours and nuances of what we feel and what we think in order to be comprehensible to others and, of course, to ourselves.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The origin of thought

  How do babies think and communicate, and how can we understand them better?

  Of all the places we travel throughout our lifetimes, the most extraordinary is certainly the land of childhood: a territory that, looked back on by the adult, becomes a simple, naive, colourful, dreamlike, playful and vulnerable space.

  It’s odd. We were all once citizens of that country, yet it is hard to remember and reconstruct it without dusting off photos in which, from a distance, we see ourselves in the third person, as if that child were someone else and not us in a different time.

  How did we think and conceive of the world before learning the words to describe it? And, while we are at it, how did we discover those words without a dictionary to define them? How is it possible that before three years of age, in a period of utter immaturity in terms of formal reasoning, we were able to discover the ins and outs of grammar and syntax?

  Here we will sketch out that journey, from the day we entered the world to the point where our language and thought resemble what we employ today as adults. The trajectory makes use of diverse vehicles, methods and tools. It intermingles reconstructions of thought from our gazes, gestures and words, along with the minute inspection of the brain that makes us who we are.

  We will see that, from the day we are born, we are already able to form abstract, sophisticated representations. Although it sounds far-fetched, babies have notions of mathematics, language, morality, and even scientific and social reasoning. This creates a repertoire of innate intuitions that structure what they will learn–what we all learned–in social, educational and family spaces, over the years of childhood.

  We will also discover that cognitive development is not the mere acquisition of new abilities and knowledge. Quite the contrary, it often consists in undoing habits that impede children from demonstrating what they already know. On occasion, and despite it being a counterintuitive idea, the challenge facing children is not acquiring new concepts but rather learning to manage those they already possess.

  I have observed that we, as adults, often draw babies poorly because we don’t realize that their body proportions are completely different from ours. Their arms, for example, are barely the size of their heads. Our difficulty in seeing them as they are serves as a morphological metaphor for understanding what is most difficult to sense in the cognitive sphere: babies are not miniature adults.

  In general, for simplicity and convenience, we speak of children in the third person, which erroneously assumes a distance, as if we were talking about something that is not us. Since this book’s intention is to travel to the innermost recesses of our brain, this first excursion, to the child we once were, will be in the first person in order to delve into how we thought, felt and represented the world in those days we can no longer recall, simply because that part of our experience has been relegated to oblivion.

  The genesis of concepts

  In the late seventeenth century, an Irish philosopher, William Molyneux, suggested the following mental experiment to his friend John Locke:

  Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere […] Suppose then the cube and the sphere placed on a table, and the blind man made to see: query, Whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could now distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube?

  Could he? In the years that I have been asking this question I’ve found that the vast majority of people believe that the answer is no. That the virgin visual experience needs to be linked to what is already known through touch. Which is to say, that a person would need to feel and see a sphere at the same time in order to discover that the gentle, smooth curve perceived by the fingertips corresponds to the image of the sphere.

  Others, the minority, believe that the previous tactile experience creates a visual mould. And that, as a result, the blind man would be able to distinguish the sphere from the cube as soon as he could see.

  John Locke, like most people, thought that a blind man would have to learn how to see. Only by seeing and touching an object at the same time would he discover that those sensations are related, requiring a translation exercise in which each sensory mode is a different language, and abstract thought is some sort of dictionary that links the tactile words with the visualized words.

  For Locke and his empiricist followers, the brain of a newborn is a blank page, a tabula rasa ready to be written on. As such, experience goes about sculpting and
transforming it, and concepts are born only when they acquire a name. Cognitive development begins on the surface with sensory experience, and, then, with the development of language, it acquires the nuances that explain the deeper and more sophisticated aspects of human thought: love, religion, morality, friendship and democracy.

  Empiricism is based on a natural intuition. It is not surprising, then, that it has been so successful and that it dominated the philosophy of the mind from the seventeenth century to the time of the great Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. However, reality is not always intuitive: the brain of a newborn is not a tabula rasa. Quite the contrary. We already come into the world as conceptualizing machines.

  The typical café discussion reasoning comes up hard against reality in a simple experiment carried out by a psychologist, Andrew Meltzoff, in which he tested a version of Molyneux’s question in order to refute empirical intuition. Instead of using a sphere and a cube, he used two dummies: one smooth and rounded and the other more bumpy, with nubs. The method is simple. In complete darkness, babies had one of the two pacifiers in their mouths. Later, the pacifiers are placed on a table and the light is turned on. And the babies looked more at the pacifier they’d had in their mouths, showing that they recognize it.

  The experiment is very simple and destroys a myth that had persisted over more than three hundred years. It shows that a newborn with only tactile experience–contact with the mouth, since at that age tactile exploration is primarily oral as opposed to manual–of an object has already conceived a representation of how it looks. This contrasts with what parents typically perceive: that newborn babies’ gazes often seem to be lost in the distance and disconnected from reality. As we will see later, the mental life of children is actually much richer and more sophisticated than we can intuit based on their inability to communicate it.

  Atrophied and persistent synaesthesias

  Meltzoff’s experiment gives–against all intuition–an affirmative response to Molyneux’s question: newborn babies can recognize by sight two objects that they have only touched. Does the same thing happen with a blind adult who begins to see? The answer to this question only recently became possible once surgeries were able to reverse the thick cataracts that cause congenital blindness.