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Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts
Stanislas Dehaene
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Introspection makes our conscious motives and strategies transparent to us, while we have no sure means of deciphering them in others. Yet we never genuinely know our true selves. We remain largely ignorant of the actual unconscious determinants of our behavior, and therefore we cannot accurately predict what our behavior will be in circumstances beyond the safety zone of our past experience. The Greek motto “Know thyself,” when applied to the minute details of our behavior, remains an inaccessible ideal. Our “self” is just a database that gets filled in through our social experiences, in the same format with which we attempt to understand other minds, and therefore it is just as likely to include glaring gaps, misunderstandings, and delusions.”
“I do not mean, of course, that we can always accurately express our conscious thoughts with Proustian accuracy. Consciousness overflows language: we perceive vastly more than we can describe.”
“Science often progresses by carving out new distinctions that refine the fuzzy categories of natural language.”
“Literature was not born the day when a boy crying “wolf, wolf” came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying “wolf, wolf” and there was no wolf behind him. Consciousness”
“quite opposite to Descartes’s organ metaphor, our global neuronal workspace does not operate in an input-output manner, waiting to be stimulated before producing its outputs. On the contrary, even in full darkness, it ceaselessly broadcasts global patterns of neural activity, causing what William James called the “stream of consciousness”—an uninterrupted flow of loosely connected thoughts, primarily shaped by our current goals and only occasionally seeking information in the senses. René Descartes could not have imagined a machine of this sort, where intentions, thoughts, and plans continually pop up to shape our behavior. The outcome, I argue, is a “free-willing” machine that resolves Descartes’s challenge”
“Vladimir Nabokov, in his Lectures on Literature (1980), saw it all: Literature was not born the day when a boy crying “wolf, wolf” came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying “wolf, wolf” and there was no wolf behind him.”
“consciousness has a precise role to play in the computational economy of the brain—it selects, amplifies, and propagates relevant thoughts.”
“What counts as genuine consciousness, I will argue, is conscious access-the simple fact that usually, whenever we are awake, whatever we decide to focus on may become conscious. Neither vigilance nor attention alone is sufficient. When we are fully awake and attentive, sometimes we can see an object and describe our perception to others, but sometimes we cannot-perhaps the object was too faint, or it was flashed too briefly to be visible. In the first case, we are said to enjoy conscious access, and in the second we are not (and yet as we shall see, our brain may be processing the information unconsciously).”
“The idea that the mind belongs to a separate realm, distinct from the body, was theorized early on, in major philosophical texts such Plato’s Phaedo (fourth century BC)”
“In point of fact, the greater one’s science, the deeper the sense of mystery. —Vladimir”
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Book Keywords:
consciousness, science, consciousness-mind-brain, proust, language