Matt Webb — whose party trick is uttering gnomic, interesting, mind-bending sentences at the drop of a hat — has gone public with his new project. He and a brain-scientist pal are co-writing BRAIN HACKS for O’Reilly: a hundred pithy tips for overlocking your amygdala.
To get where it is, the brain has made some fascinating design decisions. The layering of systems has produced a complex environment, with automatic and controlled highly mixed. This development over biological time has introduced constraints. As has the architecture–it takes time for slow signals to make their way from one area to another. And there are computational difficulties too: How much of its capabilities can the brain afford to invoke when a sub-second response is required? The tricks used leave traces. There are holes in our visual field that we continually cover up. There are certain sensory inputs that grab our attention faster and more thoroughly than we’d expect.
You don’t need to know all of neuroscience, cognitive psychology and so on to know how your brain works. I’m not a neuroscientist. I write, my undergraduate degree is in physics, I hack in my spare time, and I work in new media. But neuroscience has got to such a level now – with the imaging techniques in the last three or four years – that we can make focused probes into particular functions, and illustrate the traces that these design decisions have left (see where+how they are, and draw that up the stack towards conscious experience) and we can look at them one by one.