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

more or less predisposed to change?

       Virtue, oblivion, learning, and memory

       The universals of human thought

       The illusion of discovery

       Learning through scaffolding

       Effort and talent

       Ways of learning

       The OK threshold

       The history of human virtue

       Fighting spirit and talent: Galton’s two errors

       The fluorescent carrot

       The geniuses of the future

       Memory palace

       The morphology of form

       A monster with slow processors

       Our inner cartographers

       Fluorescent triangles

       The parallel brain and the serial brain

       Learning: a bridge between two pathways in the brain

       The repertoire of functions: learning is compiling

       Automatizing reading

       The ecology of alphabets

       The morphology of the word

       The two brains of reading

       The temperature of the brain

       6: Educated brains

      How can we use what we have learned about the brain and human thought to improve education?

       The sound of the letters

       Word-tied

       What we have to unlearn

       The framework of thought

       Parallelawhat?

       Gestures and words

       Good, bad, yes, no, OK

       The teaching instinct

       Spikes of culture

       Docendo discimus

       Epilogue

       Appendix

       Footnotes

       Bibliography

       Acknowledgements

       About the Author

       About the Publisher

       INTRODUCTION

      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 aren’t. 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 brain – consciousness – through 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,