Incognito (2 page)

Brains are in the business of gathering information and steering behavior appropriately. It doesn’t matter whether consciousness is involved in the
decision making. And most of the time, it’s not. Whether we’re talking about dilated eyes, jealousy, attraction, the love of fatty foods, or the great idea you had last week, consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain. Our brains run mostly on autopilot, and the conscious mind has little access to the giant and mysterious factory that runs below it.

You see evidence of this when your foot gets halfway to the brake before you consciously realize that a red Toyota is backing out of a driveway on the road ahead of you. You see it when you notice your name spoken in a conversation across the room that you thought you weren’t listening to, when you find someone attractive without knowing why, or when your nervous system gives you a “hunch” about which choice you should make.

The brain is a complex system, but that doesn’t mean it’s incomprehensible. Our neural circuits were carved by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species’ evolutionary history. Your brain has been molded by evolutionary pressures just as your spleen and eyes have been. And so has
your consciousness. Consciousness developed because it was advantageous,
but advantageous only in limited amounts
.

Consider the activity that characterizes a nation at any moment. Factories churn, telecommunication lines buzz with activity, businesses ship products. People eat constantly. Sewer lines direct waste. All across the great stretches of land, police chase criminals. Handshakes secure deals. Lovers rendezvous. Secretaries field calls, teachers profess, athletes compete, doctors operate, bus drivers navigate. You may wish to know what’s happening at any moment in your great nation, but you can’t possibly take in all the information at once. Nor would it be useful, even if you could. You want a summary. So you pick up a newspaper—not a dense paper like the
New York Times
but lighter fare such as
USA Today
. You won’t be surprised that none of the details of the activity are listed in the paper; after all, you want to know the bottom line. You want to know that Congress just signed a new tax law that affects your family, but the detailed origin of the idea—involving lawyers and corporations and filibusters—isn’t especially important to that new bottom line. And you certainly wouldn’t want to know all the details of the food supply of the nation—how the cows are eating and how many are being eaten—you only want to be alerted if there’s a spike of mad cow disease. You don’t care how the garbage is produced and packed away; you only care if it’s going to end up in your backyard. You don’t care about the wiring and infrastructure of the factories; you only care if the workers are going on strike. That’s what you get from reading the newspaper.

Your conscious mind is that newspaper. Your brain buzzes with activity around the clock, and, just like the nation, almost everything transpires locally: small groups are constantly making decisions and sending out messages to other groups. Out of these local interactions emerge larger coalitions. By the time you read a mental headline, the important action has already transpired, the deals are done. You have surprisingly little access to what happened behind the scenes. Entire political movements gain ground-up
support and become unstoppable before you ever catch wind of them as a feeling or an intuition or a thought that strikes you. You’re the last one to hear the information.

However, you’re an odd kind of newspaper reader, reading the headline and taking credit for the idea as though you thought of it first. You gleefully say, “I just thought of something!”, when in fact your brain performed an enormous amount of work before your moment of genius struck. When an idea is served up from behind the scenes, your neural circuitry has been working on it for hours or days or years, consolidating information and trying out new combinations. But you take credit without further wonderment at the vast, hidden machinery behind the scenes.

And who can blame you for thinking you deserve the credit? The brain works its machinations in secret, conjuring ideas like tremendous magic. It does not allow its colossal operating system to be probed by conscious cognition. The brain runs its show incognito.

So who, exactly, deserves the acclaim for a great idea? In 1862, the Scottish mathematician
James Clerk Maxwell developed a set of fundamental equations that unified electricity and magnetism. On his deathbed, he coughed up a strange sort of confession, declaring that “something within him” discovered the famous equations, not he. He admitted he had no idea how ideas actually came to him—they simply came to him.
William Blake related a similar experience, reporting of his long narrative poem
Milton
: “I have written this poem from immediate dictation twelve or sometimes twenty lines at a time without premeditation and even against my will.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe claimed to have written his novella
The Sorrows of Young Werther
with practically no conscious input, as though he were holding a pen that moved on its own.

And consider the British poet
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He began using
opium in 1796, originally for relief from the pain of toothaches and facial neuralgia—but soon he was irreversibly hooked, swigging as much as two quarts of laudanum each week. His poem
“Kubla Khan,” with its exotic and dreamy imagery, was written on an opium high that he described as “a kind of a reverie.” For him, the opium became a way to tap into his subconscious neural circuits. We credit the beautiful words of “Kubla Khan” to Coleridge because they came from
his
brain and no else’s, right? But he couldn’t get hold of those words while sober, so who exactly does the credit for the poem belong to?

As
Carl Jung put it, “In each of us there is another whom we do not know.” As
Pink Floyd put it, “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.”

Almost the entirety of what happens in your mental life is not under your conscious control, and the truth is that it’s better this way. Consciousness can take all the credit it wants, but it is best left at the sidelines for most of the decision making that cranks along in your brain. When it meddles in details it doesn’t understand, the operation runs less effectively. Once you begin deliberating about where your fingers are jumping on the piano keyboard, you can no longer pull off the piece.

To demonstrate the interference of consciousness as a party trick, hand a friend two dry erase markers—one in each hand—and ask her to sign her name with her right hand at the same time that she’s signing it backward (mirror reversed) with her left hand. She will quickly discover that there is only one way she can do it: by
not
thinking about it. By excluding conscious interference, her hands can do the complex mirror movements with no problem—but if she thinks about her actions, the job gets quickly tangled in a bramble of stuttering strokes.

So consciousness is best left uninvited from most of the parties. When it does get included, it’s usually the last one to hear the information. Take hitting a baseball. On August 20, 1974, in a game between the California Angels and the Detroit Tigers, the
Guinness Book of World Records
clocked
Nolan Ryan’s fastball
at 100.9 miles per hour (44.7 meters per second). If you work the numbers, you’ll see that Ryan’s pitch departs the mound and crosses home plate, sixty-feet, six inches away, in four-tenths of a second. This gives just enough time for light signals from the baseball to hit the batter’s eye, work through the circuitry of the retina, activate successions of cells along the loopy superhighways of the visual system at the back of the head, cross vast territories to the motor areas, and modify the contraction of the muscles swinging the bat. Amazingly, this entire sequence is possible in less than four-tenths of a second; otherwise no one would ever hit a fastball. But the surprising part is that conscious awareness takes longer than that: about half a second, as we will see in
Chapter 2
. So the ball travels too rapidly for batters to be consciously aware of it. One does not need to be consciously aware to perform sophisticated motor acts. You can notice this when you begin to duck from a snapping tree branch before you are aware that it’s coming toward you, or when you’re already jumping up when you first become aware of the phone’s ring.

The conscious mind is not at the center of the action in the brain; instead, it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity.

The emerging understanding of the brain profoundly changes our view of ourselves, shifting us from an intuitive sense that we are at the center of the operations to a more sophisticated, illuminating, and wondrous view of the situation. And indeed, we’ve seen this sort of progress before.

On a starry night in early January 1610, a Tuscan astronomer named
Galileo Galilei stayed up late, his eye pressed against the end of a tube he had designed. The tube was a telescope, and it made objects appear twenty times larger. On this night, Galileo observed Jupiter and saw what he thought were three fixed stars
near it, strung out on a line across the planet. This formation caught his attention, and he returned to it the following evening. Against his expectations, he saw that all three bodies had moved with Jupiter. That didn’t compute: stars don’t drift with planets. So Galileo returned his focus to this formation night after night. By January 15 he had cracked the case: these were not fixed stars but, rather, planetary bodies that revolved around Jupiter. Jupiter had moons.

With this observation, the celestial spheres shattered. According to the Ptolemaic theory, there was only a single center—the Earth—around which everything revolved. An alternative idea had been proposed by
Copernicus, in which the Earth went around the sun while the moon went around the Earth—but this idea seemed absurd to traditional cosmologists because it required two centers of motion. But here, in this quiet January moment, Jupiter’s moons gave testimony to multiple centers: large rocks tumbling in orbit
around
the giant planet could not also be part of the surface of celestial spheres. The Ptolemaic model in which Earth sat at the center of concentric orbits was smashed. The book in which Galileo described his discovery,
Sidereus Nuncius
, rolled off the press in Venice in March 1610 and made Galileo famous.

Six months passed before other stargazers could build instruments with sufficient quality to observe Jupiter’s moons. Soon there was a major rush on the telescope-making market, and before long astronomers were spreading around the planet to make a detailed map of our place in the universe. The ensuing four centuries provided an accelerating slide from the center, depositing us firmly as a speck in the visible universe, which contains 500 million galaxy groups, 10 billion large galaxies, 100 billion dwarf galaxies, and 2,000 billion billion suns. (And the visible universe, some 15 billion light-years across, may be a speck in a far larger totality that we cannot yet see.) It is no surprise that these astonishing numbers implied a radically different story about our existence than had been previously suggested.

For many, the fall of the Earth from the center of the universe caused profound unease. No longer could the Earth be considered the paragon of creation: it was now a planet like other planets. This challenge to authority required a change in man’s philosophical conception of the universe. Some two hundred years later,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe commemorated the immensity of Galileo’s discovery:

Galileo’s critics decried his new theory as a dethronement of man. And following the shattering of the celestial spheres came the shattering of Galileo. In 1633 he was hauled before the Catholic Church’s Inquisition, broken of spirit in a dungeon, and forced to scrawl his aggrieved signature on an Earth-centered recantation of his work.
²

Galileo might have considered himself lucky. Years earlier, another Italian,
Giordano Bruno, had also suggested that Earth was not the center, and in February 1600 he was dragged into the public square for his heresies against the Church. His captors, afraid that he might incite the crowd with his famed eloquence, attached an iron mask to his face to prevent him from speaking. He was burned alive at the stake, his eyes peering from behind
the mask at a crowd of onlookers who emerged from their homes to gather in the square, wanting to be at the center of things.

Why was Bruno wordlessly exterminated? How did a man with Galileo’s genius find himself in shackles on a dungeon floor? Evidently, not everyone appreciates a radical shift of worldview.

If only they could know where it all led! What humankind lost in certainty and egocentrism has been replaced by awe and wonder at our place in the cosmos. Even if life on other planets is terribly unlikely—say the odds are less than one in a billion—we can still expect several billion planets to be sprouting like Chia Pets with life. And if there’s only a one-in-a-million chance of life-bearing planets producing meaningful levels of intelligence (say, more than space bacteria), that would still predict several million globes with creatures intermingling in unimaginably strange civilizations. In this way, the fall from the center opened our minds to something much larger.