Only a small fraction of the brain is dedicated to conscious behavior. The rest were working feverishly behind the scenes that regulate everything from breathing to mate selection. In fact, neuroscientist David Eagleman of the Baylor College of Medicine argues that the unconscious functioning of the brain are so crucial to the daily operation of their influence often trumps conscious thought. To prove it, he explores little-known historical events, the latest psychological research and enduring medical mysteries, revealing strange and inexplicable mechanisms often underlying everyday life.
Eagleman’s theory is summarized in the confession of his death bed on the 19 th century mathematician James Clerk Maxwell, who developed the fundamental equations of the unification of electricity and magnetism. Maxwell said that “something in it” had made the discoveries, which really had no idea how he achieved his great ideas. It’s easy to take credit after an idea hits you, but in fact, neurons in the brain secretly conducting a massive amount of work before you get the inspiration. The brain, Eagleman says, runs his incognito show. Or, as Pink Floyd said, “There’s someone in my head, but not me.” There is a gap between what the brain is coming and you know what your mind is able to access. Consider the simple act of changing lanes while driving a car. Try this: Close your eyes, grab an imaginary steering wheel, and with the formalities of a lane change. Imagine you are driving in the left lane and you would like move to the right lane. Before reading on, really concerned. I give you 100 points if you can make correctly.It ‘s a pretty easy task, right? I suppose you held the wheel right, then right overcharged for a moment, then straightened out again. No problem.
Like almost everyone else, have it completely wrong. The movement of the steering wheel to the right a bit, then straighten the road again to guide you: just started a course from the left at the curb. The right move for changing lanes is banking on the right wheel, then back through downtown, continuing to spin the wheel as far to the left side, and only then straighten. Do not you think? Check for yourself when you’re next in the car. It is a task so simple that the motor has no problem carrying it out in everyday driving. But when forced to access it consciously, that is confused.
The example of lane change is one of the thousand. They are unaware of the vast majority of current activities to your brain, or want to be, that could interfere with well-oiled processes of the brain. The best way to spoil your piano work is concentrated in the fingers, the best way to get out of breath is your breath thinking, the best way to lose the golf ball is to analyze your swing. This wisdom is evident even for children, and we find the immortalized in poems like “The Puzzled Centipede”:
A centipede was happy enough,
Until a frog in fun
He said: “Pray tell the leg comes after which?”
This raised her mind to such an extent
She was distracted by the wayside
Not knowing how to run.
The ability to remember the motor acts as a lane change is called procedural memory, and is a type of implicit memory, which means that your brain is aware of something that your mind can not enter explicitly. Riding a bike, tying shoes, writing on a keyboard, and the direction of his car in a parking lot while talking on your cell phone, are examples of this. Perform these actions with ease, but without knowing the details of how. That would be totally unable to describe the choreography perfectly synchronized with the muscles to contract and relax while browsing other people in a cafe, holding a tray, however, has no problems doing that. This is the difference between what the brain can do and what you can take consciously.
The concept of implicit memory has a rich but little-known tradition. By early 1600, René Descartes had already begun to suspect that although the experience with the world is stored in memory, not all memory is accessible. The concept was revived in late 1800 by the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, who wrote that “most of these experiences are hidden from consciousness and yet produce an effect that is significant and which authenticates their previous life.”
To the extent that consciousness is useful, it is useful in small quantities, and very particular type of tasks. It is easy to understand why you do not want to be aware of the complexities of muscle movement, but this may be less intuitive when applied to their perceptions, thoughts and beliefs, which are also the end products of the activity of thousands of millions of nerves the cells. We turn to these images.
Sexers chicken and plane spotters
When the young are born chicken, large commercial farms are usually devoted to divide men and women, and the practice of distinguishing between the sexes is known as chick sexing. Sex determination is necessary because the two sexes receive different feeding programs: one for females, which eventually produce eggs, and one for males, which are usually intended to be deleted due to its ineffectiveness in trade egg production, and only a few men are kept and fattened for meat. So the work is to collect the girl Sexer each offspring and quickly determine their sex in order to choose the correct box to put pulgEl problem is that the task is famous for its difficulty: male and female chicks look exactly alike.
Well, almost exactly. The Japanese invented a method for determining the sex of chickens called vent sexing, so that experts could quickly determine the sex of a day-old pups. Since the 1930s, poultry farmers around the world traveled to the Zen Nippon Chick Sexing in Japan to learn the technique.
The mystery was that nobody could explain exactly how it was done. It was based on visual cues in some subtle way, but the professional Sexers could not say what those signs were. You would see on the back of the chicken (where ventilation is) and only seem to know the correct bin to pull in.