Mind Hacks™: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain (2 page)

Think for a moment about all that’s happening while you read this text: how your eyes move
to center themselves on the words, how you idly scratch your arm while you’re thinking, the
attention-grabbing movements, noises, and other distractions you’re filtering out. How does
all this work? As one brain speaking to another, here’s a secret: it isn’t easy.

The brain is a fearsomely complex information-processing environment. Take the processing
involved in seeing, for instance. One of the tasks involved in seeing is detecting the motion
in every tiny portion of vision, in such and such a direction and at such and such a speed,
and representing that in the brain. But another task is seeing a face in the light that falls
on the retina, figuring out what emotion it’s showing, and representing that concept in the
brain, somehow, too.

To an extent, the brain is modular, so that should give us a way in, but it’s not that
clean-cut. The processing subsystems of the brain are layered on top of one another, but their
functionality mingles rather than being organized in a distinct progression. Often the same
task is performed in many different places, in many different ways. It’s not a clear
mechanical system like clockwork or like a computer program; giving the same input won’t
always give the same output. Automatic and voluntary actions are highly meshed, often
inextricable. Parts of vision that appear fully isolated from conscious experience suddenly
report different results if conscious expectations change.

The information transformations in the brain are made yet more complicated by the
constraints of history, computation, and architecture. Development over evolutionary time has
made it hard for the brain to backtrack; the structure of the brain must reflect its growth
and repurposing. Computation has to occur as fast as possible — we’re talking subsecond
responses — but there are limits on the speed at which information can travel between physical
parts of the brain. These are all constraints to be worked with.

All of which leaves us with one question: how can we possibly start to understand what’s
going on?

Cognitive neuroscience is the study of the brain biology behind our mental functions. It
is a collection of methods (like brain scanning and computational modeling) combined with a
way of looking at psychological phenomena and discovering where, why, and how the brain makes
them happen. It is neither classic neuroscience — a low-level tour of the biology of the
brain — nor is it what many people think of as psychology — a metaphorical exploration of human
inner life; rather, it’s a view of the mind that looks at the fundamental elements and rules,
acting moment by moment, that makes up conscious experience and action.

By focusing both on the biological substrate and on the high-level phenomenon of
consciousness, we can pick apart the knot of the brain. This picking apart is why you don’t
need to be a cognitive neuroscientist to reap the fruit of the field.

This book is a collection of probes into the moment-by-moment works of the brain. It’s not
a textbook — more of a buffet, really. Each hack is one probe into the operation of the brain,
one small demonstration. By seeing how the brain responds, we pick up traces of the structures
present and the design decision made, learning a little bit more about how the brain is put
together.

Simultaneously we’ve tried to show how there isn’t a separation between the voluntary “me”
feeling of the mind and the automatic nature of the brain — the division between voluntary and
automatic behavior is more of an ebb and flow, and we wield our cognitive abilities with
unconscious flourishes and deliberate movements much as we wield, say, our hands, or a pen, or
a lathe.

In a sense, we’re trying to understand the capabilities that underpin the mind. Say we
understand to what extent the holes in our vision are continually covered up or what sounds
and lights will — without a doubt — grab our attention (and also what won’t): we’ll be able to
design better tools, and create better interfaces that work with the grain of our mental
architecture and not against it. We’ll be able to understand ourselves a little better; know a
little more, in a very real sense, about what makes us tick.

Plus it’s fun. That’s the key. Cognitive neuroscience is a fairly new discipline. The
journey into the brain is newly available and an enjoyable ride. The effects we’ll see are
real enough, but the explanations of why they occur are still being debated. We’re taking part
in the mapping of this new territory just by playing along. Over the course of writing this
book, we’ve spent time noticing our own attention systems darting about the room, seen
ourselves catching gestures from people we’ve been talking to, and played games with the color
of traffic and peripheral vision. That’s the fun bit. But we’ve also been gripped by the
arguments in the scientific literature and have had new insights into facets of our everyday
lives, such as why some web sites are annoying and certain others are particularly well-made.
If, through this book, we’ve managed to make that world a little more accessible too, then
we’ve succeeded. And when you’ve had a look around and found new ways to apply these ideas
and, yes, new topics we’ve not touched on, please do let us know. We’re here for the ride
too.

"What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" filetype:pdf