The Brain: The Story of You by Eagleman David

Author:Eagleman, David [Eagleman, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2015-11-05T05:00:00+00:00

As in the movie Back to the Future, humans time travel daily.

Time travel is something the human brain does relentlessly. When faced with a decision, our brains simulate different outcomes to generate a mockup of what our future might be. Mentally, we can disconnect from the present moment and voyage to a world that doesn’t yet exist.

Now, simulating a scenario in my mind is just the first step. To decide between the imagined scenarios, I try to estimate what the reward will be in each of those potential futures. When I simulate filling my pantry with the groceries, I feel a sense of relief at being organized and avoiding uncertainty. The grant carries different sorts of rewards: not only money for the laboratory, but more generally the kudos from my department chairman and a rewarding sense of accomplishment in my career. Imagining myself at the park with my son inspires joy, and a sense of reward in terms of family closeness. My final decision will be navigated by how each future stacks up against the others in the common currency of my reward systems. The choice isn’t easy, because all these valuations are nuanced: the simulation of the grocery shopping is accompanied by feelings of tedium; the grant writing is attended by a sense of frustration; the park with guilt about not getting work done. Typically under the radar of awareness, my brain simulates all the options, one at a time, and does a gut check on each. That’s how I decide.

How do I accurately simulate these futures? How can I possibly predict what it will really be like to go down these paths? The answer is that I can’t: there’s no way to know that my predictions will be accurate. All my simulations are only based on my past experiences and my current models of how the world works. Like all animals in the animal kingdom, we can’t just wander around hoping to randomly discover what results in future reward and what doesn’t. Instead, the key business of brains is to predict. And to do this reasonably well, we need to continually learn about the world from our every experience. So in this case, I place a value on each of these options based on my past experiences. Using the Hollywood studios in our minds, we travel in time to our imagined futures to see how much value they’ll have. And that’s how I make my choices, comparing possible futures against one another. That’s how I convert competing options into a common currency of future reward.

Think of my predicted reward value for each option like an internal appraisal that stores how good something will be. Because grocery shopping will supply me with food, let’s say it’s worth ten reward units. Grant writing is difficult but necessary to my career, so it weighs in at twenty-five reward units. I love spending time with my son, so going to the park is worth fifty reward units.

But there’s an interesting twist here: the world is complicated, and so our internal appraisals are never written in permanent ink.

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