Brain Bugs

An authoritative overview of how brain flaws shape our lives by a professor of neurobiology and psychology at UCLA. Much of the vocabulary is technological, hence the reference to the brain as a device or piece of technology when it is in fact an organ – our metaphors are mechanical. The book is highly readable and covers a wide range of phenomena including memory, temporal distortions, fear, and unreasonable reasoning where our opinions are influenced by arbitrary factors. A useful and key phrase is that of associative architecture used by advertisers to create fabricated associations within the brain allied to desirable qualities. As well as being essential for memory, it mediates our susceptibility to psychological manipulation. The distorted sense of time can have a dramatic effect on our financial, health and environmental policies, while fear can cloud our judgement and influence our behaviour in many ways. The situation is made more challenging by the fact that the brain itself acts as an editor and censor in relation to the conscious mind - the author gives a neat demonstration of this by inserting an extra 'the' into a sentence and then pointing it out in the next one! Unreasonable reasoning includes cognitive biases, which the author himself unwittingly demonstrates in his chapter on supernatural bugs. He is quite right that many beliefs are irrational and in the case of Christian Science can lead to unnecessary deaths, but then he lumps together animistic beliefs with telepathy, ghosts and clairvoyance. These arguments should be evidence-based and subject to reason. The last chapter discusses debugging techniques, enabling readers to be more aware of unconscious biases so that we can more easily compensate for our brain bugs. He quotes a Spanish neuroscientist as saying 'as long as the brain is a mystery, the universe – a reflection of the structure of the brain – will also be a mystery.'