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

I like to think of science as a ship that takes us to unknown places, the remotest parts of the universe, into the inner workings of light and the tiniest molecules of life. This ship has instruments, telescopes and microscopes, which make visible what was once invisible. But science is also the route itself, the binnacle, the chart leading us towards the unknown.

My voyage over the last twenty years, between New York, Paris and Buenos Aires, has been into the innermost parts of the human brain, an organ composed of countless neurons that codify perception, reason, emotions, dreams and language.

The goal of this book is to discover our mind in order to understand ourselves more deeply, even in the tiniest recesses that make up who we are. We will look at how we form ideas during our first days of life, how we give shape to our fundamental decisions, how we dream and how we imagine, why we feel certain emotions, how the brain transforms and how who we are changes along with it.

Throughout these pages we will see the brain from a distance. We will go where thought begins to take shape. And it is there where psychology meets neuroscience. This is the ocean in which many people of varied disciplines have sailed, including biologists, physicists, mathematicians, psychologists, anthropologists, linguists, philosophers, doctors. As well as chefs, magicians, musicians, chess masters, writers, artists. This book is a result of that amalgam.

The first chapter is a journey to the land of childhood. We will see that the brain is already prepared for language long before we begin to speak, that bilingualism helps us to think, and that early on we form notions of what is good and what is fair, and about cooperation and competition, that later affect how we relate to ourselves and others. This early intuitive thinking leaves lasting traces on the way we reason and decide.

In the second chapter we will explore what defines the blurry, fine line between what we are willing to do and what we arent. Those decisions that make us who we are. How do reason and feelings work together in social and emotional decisions? What makes us trust others and ourselves? We will discover that small differences in decision-making brain circuits can drastically change our way of deciding, from the simplest decisions to the most profound and sophisticated ones that define us as social beings.

The third and fourth chapters travel into the most mysterious aspect of thought and the human brainconsciousnessthrough an unprecedented meeting between Freud and the latest neuroscience. What is the unconscious and how does it control us? We will see that we can read and decipher thoughts by decoding patterns of brain activity, even in vegetative patients who have no other way to express themselves. And who is it that awakens when consciousness awakens? We will see the first sketches of how we can now record our dreams and visualize them within some sort of oneiric planetarium, and explore the fauna of different states of consciousness, like lucid dreams and thinking under the effects of marijuana or hallucinogenic drugs.

The last two chapters cover questions of how the brain learns in different circumstances, from everyday life to formal education. For example, is it true that learning a new language is much harder for an adult than for a child? We will take a journey into the history of learning, looking at effort and ability, the drastic transformation that takes place in the brain when we learn to read, and the brains predisposition to change. This book outlines how all this knowledge can be used responsibly to improve the largest collective experiment in the history of humanity: school.

The Secret Life of the Mind is a summary of neuroscience from the perspective of my own experience. I look at neuroscience as a way to help us communicate with each other. From this perspective, neuroscience is another tool in humanitys ancestral search to expresssometimes rudimentarilythe shades, colours and nuances of what we feel and what we think in order to be comprehensible to others and, of course, to ourselves.