All Activity In The Brain Is Driven

Because Vision Appears So Effortless, We Are Like Fish Challenged To Understand Water.

We Are Nothing But The Product Of Billions Of Years Of Molecules Coming Together And Ratcheting Up Through Natural Selection, We Are Composed Only Of Highways Of Fluids And Chemicals Sliding Along Roadways Within Billions Of Dancing Cells, Trillions Of Synaptic Conversations Hum In Parallel, This Vast Egglike Fabric Of Micron-thin Circuitry Runs Algorithms Undreamt Of In Modern Science, And These Neural Programs Give Rise To Our Decision Making, Loves, Desires, Fears, And Aspirations. That Understanding Would Be A Numinous Experience, Better Than Anything Ever Proposed In Anyone's Holy Text.

The Brain "fills In" The Missing Information From The Blind Spot. Notice What You See In The Location Of The Dot When It's In Your Blind Spot. When The Dot Disappears, You Do Not Perceive A Hole Of Whiteness Or Blackness In Its Place; Instead Your Brain Invents A Patch Of The Background Pattern. Your Brain, With No Information From That Particular Spot In Visual Space, Fills In With The Patterns Around It. You're Not Perceiving What's Out There. You're Perceiving Whatever Your Brain Tells You.

Societies Would _not_ Be Better Off If Everyone Were Like Mr Spock, All Rationality And No Emotion. Instead, A Balance - A Teaming Up Of The Internal Rivals - Is Optimal For Brains. ... Some Balance Of The Emotional And Rational Systems Is Needed, And That Balance May Already Be Optimized By Natural Selection In Human Brains.

This Is The Hallmark Of A Robust Biological System: Political Parties Can Perish In A Tragic Accident And The Society Will Still Run, Sometimes With Little More Than A Hiccup To The System. It May Be That For Every Strange Clinical Case In Which Brain Damage Leads To A Bizarre Change In Behavior Or Perception, There Are Hundreds Of Cases In Which Parts Of The Brain Are Damaged With No Detectable Clinical Sign.