New Scientist New Scientist - The Brain: A User’s Guide

Defy ageing and unlock your inner genius by pimping and hacking your brain.

Whats going on inside your head?

If youre reading this, congratulations! Youre the proud owner of the most complex information-processing device in the known universe. An adult human brain weighs in at just 1.4 kilograms but packs an incredible punch: 86 billion nerve cells with nearly a trillion connections between them. This biological supercomputer comes equipped with all sorts of design features from consciousness and memory to intelligence and creativity but also has many bugs and weaknesses. The problem is, you dont get a users manual. You have to just plug and play. As a result, most of us never properly understand how our brains work and what theyre truly capable of.

Perhaps thats no surprise, because your brain is like an iceberg. Think of the visible portion above the waterline as your conscious awareness, and the rest as your unconscious. This submerged 90 per cent is where most of the action takes place, but it is extremely adept at hiding what its up to.

Take your perceptions of the world around you. Its easy to assume that your eyes act like a video camera, faithfully recording what is going on in the outside world and relaying it in glorious 3D technicolour to your brain. In reality, most of what you see is made up by your brain, a carefully orchestrated hallucination of reality.

This is easy to demonstrate. Close your left eye and look hard to the left. You will notice a large, fleshy, blurry object; this is your nose. It is always within your field of vision, so why dont you see it all the time? It is because your brain has decided it isnt important information and is edits it out. In fact, your eyes are constantly darting around all over the place, but youre not aware of this either, because your brain operates sophisticated software to link these fragmentary snapshots into a seamless movie. What you see is a largely a fabrication by your mind.

There are dozens of similar easy-to-do experiments throughout this book, often demonstrating how what we are consciously aware of diverts radically from reality.

Take your earliest memory. Mine is visiting my new sister in hospital soon after my second birthday. I can vividly picture her lying asleep in a cot wrapped in a blanket, me on my mothers bed and a woman knitting on the other side of the hospital room. But Im aware that this is unlikely to be a true recollection. Although a few people can recall events from their third year, the average age of a first memory is around three-and-a-half and some people cant recall anything before they were six.

Its possible I could be a childhood memory prodigy, but I doubt it. Through my work at New Scientist Ive had the privilege of interviewing false memory expert Elizabeth Loftus, who has demonstrated how easy it is to create memories of things that didnt happen. Though it feels very real to me, I now think that my earliest memory is likely to be something my brain invented at a later date, based on other peoples anecdotes and photographs.