“A core finding of this work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. The conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind gives us other, more supple ways. The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to go along with the conventional surface one. “
Neuroscience is the future. But people commonly assume it’s going to tell us something reductionist about ourselves, that we are all about synapses and neurotransmitters and neural chemistry. I think we will be surprised. A neurologist once told me, “We have not begun to fathom how complicated the brain is. Several orders of complexity greater than we now assume.”
No comments:
Post a Comment