The Secret Life of the Mind: How Your Brain Thinks, Feels, and Decides

by Mariano Sigman

Overview

From a world-renowned leader in neuroscience, a provocative, enthralling journey into the depths of the human mind.

Where do our thoughts come from? How do we make choices and trust our judgments? What is the role of the unconscious? Can we manipulate our dreams? In this mind-bending international bestseller, award-winning neuroscientist Mariano Sigman explores the complex answers to these and many other age-old questions.

Over the course of his 20-year career investigating the inner workings of the human brain, Dr. Sigman has cultivated a remarkable interdisciplinary vision. He draws on research in physics, linguistics, psychology, education, and beyond to explain why people who speak more than one language are less prone to dementia; how infants can recognize by sight objects they've previously only touched; how babies, even before they utter their first word, have an innate sense of right and wrong; and how we can "read" the thoughts of vegetative patients by decoding patterns in their brain activity.

Building on the author's awe-inspiring TED talk, the cutting-edge research presented in The Secret Life of the Mind revolutionizes how we understand the role that neuroscience plays in our lives, unlocking the mysterious cerebral processes that control the ways in which we learn, reason, feel, think, and dream.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316549615
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	06/27/2017
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	311,961
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Mariano Sigman, PhD, a physicist by training, is a leading international figure in the cognitive neuroscience of learning and decision-making. His awards include a Human Frontiers Career Development Award, the National Prize of Physics, the Pius XI medal from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Young Investigator Prize of "College de France," and the IBM Scalable Data Analytics Award.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 The origin of thought: How do babies think and communicate, and how can we understand them better? 5

The genesis of concepts 6

Atrophied and persistent synaesthesias 8

The mirror between perception and action 11

Piaget's mistake! 13

The executive system 15

The secret in their eyes 16

Development of attention 18

The language instinct 20

Mother tongue 22

The children of Babel 25

A conjecturing machine 28

The good, the bad and the ugly 31

He who robs a thief … 33

The colour of a jersey, strawberry or chocolate 34

Émile and Minerva's owl 38

I, me, mine and other permutations by George 40

Transactions in the playground, or the origin of commerce and theft 41

Jacques, innatism, genes, biology, culture and an image 44

2 The fuzzy borders of identity: What defines our choices and allows us to trust other people and our own decisions? 47

Churchill, Turing and his labyrinth 48

Turing's brain 49

Turing in the supermarket 53

The tell-tale heart 55

The body in the casino and at the chessboard 57

Rational deliberation or hunches? 59

Sniffing out love 60

Believing, knowing, trusting 63

Confidence: flaws and signatures 64

The nature of optimists 65

Odysseus and the consortium we belong to 69

Flaws in confidence 72

Others' gazes 75

The inner battles that make us who we are 78

The chemistry and culture of confidence 85

The seeds of corruption 91

The persistence of social trust 95

To sum up … 97

3 The machine that constructs reality: How does consciousness emerge in the brain and how are we governed by our unconscious? 99

Lavoisier, the heat of consciousness 99

Pyschology in the prehistory of neuroscience 100

Freud working in the dark 102

Free will gets up off the couch 104

The interpreter of consciousness 108

'Performiments': freedom of expression 109

The prelude to consciousness 112

In short: the circle of consciousness 115

The physiology of awareness 117

Reading consciousness 120

Observing the imagination 121

Shades of consciousness 123

Do babies have consciousness? 126

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? 129

Altered states of consciousness 129

Nocturnal elephants 131

The uroboros plot 134

Deciphering dreams 137

Daydreams 138

Lucid dreaming 141

Voyages of consciousness 143

The factory of beatitude 143

The cannabic frontier 147

Towards a positive pharmacology 149

The consciousness of Mr X 150

The lysergic repertoire 153

Hoffman's dream 155

The past and the future of consciousness 159

The future of consciousness: is there a limit to mind-reading? 165

5 The brain is constantly transforming: What makes our brain more or less predisposed to change? 169

Virtue, oblivion, learning, and memory 169

The universals of human thought 170

The illusion of discovery 173

Learning through scaffolding 175

Effort and talent 177

Ways of learning 178

The OK threshold 179

The history of human virtue 180

Fighting spirit and talent: Galton's two errors 181

The fluorescent carrot 185

The geniuses of the future 187

Memory palace 190

The morphology of form 193

A monster with slow processors 194

Our inner cartographers 197

Fluorescent triangles 198

The parallel brain and the serial brain 199

Learning: a bridge between two pathways in the brain 200

The repertoire of functions: learning is compiling 200

Automatizing reading 202

The ecology of alphabets 203

The morphology of the word 204

The two brains of reading 206

The temperature of the brain 206

6 Educated brains: How can we use what we have learned about the brain and human thought to improve education? 211

The sound of the letters 212

Word-tied 214

What we have to unlearn 217

The framework of thought 219

Parallelawhat? 222

Gestures and words 224

Good, bad, yes, no, OK 227

The teaching instinct 228

Spikes of culture 236

Docendo discimus 238

Epilogue 243

Appendix 245

Bibliography 247

Acknowledgements 264

Index 267

What People are Saying About This

author of The Tell-Tale Brain - V. S. Ramachandran

“Every year 20,000 papers are presented at the annual meeting of the society for neuroscience yet we don't have tentative answers to even ‘simple’ questions, such as why we sing, laugh, dance, or cry - let alone the lofty question of how a pack of neurons gives rise to consciousness and sense of self. Amidst the din and chaos of empirical data that threatens to deluge us, it is refreshing to see a ‘big picture’ book that attempts to tackle such issues. In attempting this the author takes us on grand tour covering an extraordinarily diverse range of topics that are of interest to the common people and specialists alike.”

Editorial Reviews

04/24/2017
Hidden, behind-the-scenes mechanics of thought are revealed in this scintillating ramble through brain science. Cognitive neuroscientist Sigman expands his celebrated TED talk to show the unexpected inner workings of a raft of mental phenomena: the sophisticated innate theories of mind and moral philosophy that infants use to parse social life and the complex statistical analyses they deploy to learn language; the subconscious calculations that underlie hunches, which turn out to be surprisingly accurate and which determine our decisions many seconds before we are consciously aware of them; the active mental lives of patients in a “vegetative state”; the genetic endowment of champion athletes, seen less in physical talent than in mental determination and “fighting spirit”; astronomer Carl Sagan’s marijuana epiphanies; and the author’s own mysterious ability to control the temperature of his fingertips. Calling on authors from Plato to Freud and on a trove of cute experiments on brainy babies, some of his own devising, Sigman’s lucid exposition probes and unsettles our intuitions about how we think in the light of new science that makes the machinery transparent. The loosely organized text meanders at times, but readers will find it a fascinating browse packed with arresting insights at every turn. Agent: Max Brockman, Brockman Inc. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"Sigman provides vivid depictions of foundational behavioral psychology experiments...The book's exhaustive survey of experiments is, overall, enlightening, and Sigman's clear passion for neuroscience makes it easy to browse."—Science Magazine

"Every year 20,000 papers are presented at the annual meeting of the society for neuroscience yet we don't have tentative answers to even 'simple' questions, such as why we sing, laugh, dance, or cry — let alone the lofty question of how a pack of neurons gives rise to consciousness and sense of self. Amidst the din and chaos of empirical data that threatens to deluge us, it is refreshing to see a 'big picture' book that attempts to tackle such issues. In attempting this the author takes us on grand tour covering an extraordinarily diverse range of topics that are of interest to the common people and specialists alike."—V. S. Ramachandran, author of The Tell-Tale Brain

"Sigman is one of the many professors to become popularizers of their own fields... His book is peppered with brief stories and artistic allusions, and it moves quickly from idea to idea, study to study."—New York Times Book Review

"If, as the poetess Emily Dickinson wrote, 'the brain is deeper than the sea,' then Mariano Sigman's book is the perfect travel guide to those uncharted abysses. Concise, pithy, sprinkled with illuminating metaphors, this book takes you on a most entertaining journey into the subtleties and oddities of the human mind. This trip into ourselves is rewarded with many insights into such ill-known concepts as inner unconscious battles, lucid dreams, bilingual brains and mind-reading infants. The company of brilliant minds, including Chomsky, Turing, Rousseau, Molière, Plato, Sagan, and Freud, and their revisiting in the smart light of Mariano Sigman's clever experiments, make this book enormously enjoyable, from beginning to end — a riveting scientific page-turner."—Stanislas Dehaene, author of Consciousness and the Brain and Reading in the Brain

"Mariano Sigman writes and thinks in a uniquely provocative way. He is a gifted cognitive neuroscientist, and we are lucky to have him excavating the secret life of the mind. You will not be able to resist his analogies, which are always deeply informative and often amusing. He makes learning about the mind and brain easy and almost automatic. He is the Richard Feynman of the brain."
—Andrew Meltzoff, Professor of Psychology, the University of Washington, and co-author of The Scientist in the Crib

From the Publisher

★ 08/01/2017
Physicist and neuroscientist Sigman (founder, Integrative Neuroscience Laboratory, Univ. of Buenos Aires, Argentina) here builds on his popular TED Talk "Your Words May Predict Your Future Mental Health." His goal is to help readers understand themselves more deeply. Ideas, dreams, emotions from childhood, consciousness, and learning are major themes in this guide to self-knowledge. The human brain has changed little in 60,000 years. At six months infants theorize and form abstract concepts, making discoveries through play and logic, similar to scientific method. They can infer intentions, desires, kindness and wrongdoing. Two year olds comprehend ownership, and with this text, adults can appreciate their thinking and judgment. Currently, most children engage with more than one language—a mental boon for attention, cognitive development, and social inclusion. Sigman's text alludes to ideas from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile and celebrates the work of cognitive psychologist Jacques Mehler. VERDICT Accessible, enjoyable, and enriching, this work is a boon to lay readers, students, and scientists.—E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC

Library Journal

2017-04-30
An exploration of recent discoveries in neuroscience and the ways in which we perceive and interpret the world.The good news is that good news is received and processed in one part of the brain. The bad news is that bad news is received and processed in another region. Why? Sigman, the founder of the Integrative Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Buenos Aires and director of the Human Brain Project, ventures explanations for this apparent mystery, but more, he enfolds a few lessons on the controversial thesis that optimists and pessimists have different kinds of brains, much as conservatives and liberals are said to be wired differently. The author is an experimentalist with training in physics, supporting these softer interpretations with hard-edged results. One of the most on-point parts of the book is Sigman's discussion of the application of neuroscience to general education. Dyslexia, by the author's account, is more a phonological than a visual problem, leading him to declare, "you cannot read without being able to pronounce," and adding, "the phonological awareness system can be stimulated before reading begins," preparing children for reading with word games and other activities. In the larger sphere, learning a second language in very early childhood helps shatter prejudices, for even then, children discern accents and tend to trust those who sound more like them than linguistic outsiders do. The takeaway is that "revealing and understanding these predispositions can be a tool for changing them." The idea that through its relative plasticity the child brain can be molded for the better is not new, but Sigman's pointed examples of rational (and not so rational) decision-making, consciousness, mental states, and learning ("culture travels like a highly contagious virus") are backed by the latest research. There have been many recent books on the workings of the mind, and while this one doesn't quite stand out with the best of the pack, it rewards readers with many useful insights.

Kirkus Reviews