Behavior Is The Outcome Of The Battle

Knowing Yourself Now Requires The Understanding That The Conscious You Occupies Only A Small Room In The Mansion Of The Brain, And That It Has Little Control Over The Reality Constructed For You.

The Brain Runs Its Show Incognito.

The Left Hemisphere Acts As An "interpreter," Watching The Actions And Behaviors Of The Body And Assigning A Coherent Narrative To These Events. And The Left Hemisphere Works This Way Even In Normal, Intact Brains. Hidden Programs Drive Actions, And The Left Hemisphere Makes Justifications. This Idea Of Retrospective Storytelling Suggests That We Come To Know Our Own Attitudes And Emotions, At Least Partially, By Inferring Them From Observations Of Our Own Behavior.

If Choices And Decisions Derive From Hidden Mental Processes, Then Free Choice Is Either An Illusion Or, At Minimum, More Tightly Constrained Than Previously Considered.

The Three-pound Organ In Your Skull - With Its Pink Consistency Of Jell-o - Is An Alien Kind Of Computational Material. It Is Composed Of Miniaturized, Self-configuring Parts, And It Vastly Outstrips Anything We've Dreamt Of Building.