5 Things YOU Need to Know about YOUR Brain

The goal of my podcast Brain Science is to provide an accurate, but accessible account of how recent discoveries in neuroscience arunraveling the mystery of how our brain makes us human. The episodes vary in level of technical difficulty, but our overall focus is on the big picture. What do these discoveries mean to our daily lives?

I have chosen these 5 “things” with this goal in mind:

1. Your Brain creates everything you experience

2. Most of what your brain does is unconscious

3. Everyone’s memory is unreliable

4. You are wired to be social

5. You are NOT a “brain in a vat”

The rest of this handout is a brief discussion of these 5 ideas.

1. Your Brain creates everything you experience

The scientific evidence is overwhelming that your brain is the source of everything youexperience. A simple definition of consciousness is subjective experience. Your brain relies on inputs via the body to generate your experience of both your body and the outside world.

Michael Graziano has observed that our brain gives us a “cartoon version” of reality, which is to say it only “tells” us what we need to know to survive. The reason consciousness feels like something “immaterial” is that we have no access to the brain processes that create it.

Why this matters:

It means that none of us has access to the full picture. Our experience is inevitably subjective and incomplete. If we insist that our viewpoint is the Truth, this can lead to conflict. The scientific method provides a tool for testing our ideas in a way that can be shared with others.

2. Most of what your brain does is unconscious.

Another theme that is frequently explored on Brain Science is the surprising discovery that most of what our brains do is not only unconscious, but inaccessible to introspection.

We would be quickly overwhelmed if we had to devote conscious attention to everything our brain does to keep us alive, but this discovery also has important implications for our understanding of ourselves and others.

For example, we do not choose what we believe even though we can consciously generate justifications for those beliefs. I discussed this in greater detail in my book Are You Sure? The

Unconscious Origins of Certainty (2020). This is one reason two people can reach opposite conclusions when looking at the same “facts.” It also sheds light on why more facts rarely change people’s minds.

Why it matters:

Knowing about the pivotal role of unconscious processes could make us more tolerant of viewpoints that differ from our own. We can also become more tolerant of our own behavior, which is inevitably contradictory and doesn’t always live up to our conscious ideals.

We can also be vigilant against attempts to manipulate our behavior via emotion.

3. Everyone’s memory is unreliable

Many people assume that memory works like a multi-sensory playback device, but the reality is that memory is dynamic, which means it is constantly changing.

Every time we recall something that memory is recreated by the areas of the brain that were originally involved, but the catch is that the “replay” is altered by whatever we have learned and done since the last recall. It appears that the brain values updating over accuracy.

Why it matters:

Our current justice system places great weight on eye witness testimony without acknowledging its proven unreliability. We also tend to accuse others of deliberately “changing” their story instead of realizing that this is just how the brain works.

Understanding how memory really works could literally save lives and improve our relationships with those around us.

4. You are wired to be Social.

Neuroscientists have come to realize that much of the extra brain power that humans enjoy is actually devoted to social interaction. Social skills are so important that when babies are deprived of human interaction early in life, they become permanently and severely disabled.

We also know that social rejection stimulates some of the same brain areas as physical pain.

Why it matters:

We are coming to appreciate that social isolation is damaging to our mental health, but probably more critically social neuroscience offers potential insights into why living in a multicultural society is so challenging. We seem “wired” to prefer those who look like us.

We have to acknowledge and overcome these tendencies to avoid prejudice. We also have to beware of those who would manipulate these tendencies to foster hate and conflict.

5. You are NOT a “brain in a vat.”

The key idea here is that your brain cannot create consciousness without Your body. Your brain depends on your body, both for its inputs and its outputs. It can’t do anything on its own.

I often talk about how the brain is different from a computer, but I have decided that understanding the embodied nature of OUR consciousness is more important. It means that we should not put our hopes for the future into schemes for uploading our brains to the cloud.

Even if we had a more complete understanding of our brains, simulating this in a computer would not be US.

Why it matters:

Understanding the embodied nature of our consciousness reminds us that we are part of Nature, not separate from it.

Closing Thoughts

Obviously, there are many other important ideas that I could have listed, such as the exciting discoveries about brain plasticity. However, I hope this short handout gives you a feel for why Ibelieve that having a basic grasp of neuroscience is essential to being a citizen in the 21st Century.

Ginger Campbell, MD

October3, 2023