Noted

The Idiot Brain - review
Why do we remember faces but forget names? Why do we lose track of vitally important information – appointments, addresses, anniversaries – but remember embarrassing or painful childhood memories we would rather expunge? Why do we stride into rooms to do something urgent but then can’t recall what it was?All these questions and many more – about memory, thought, perception, cognition and intelligence – are answered in The Idiot Brain by neuroscientist and Guardian science blogger Dean Burnett.We think of our brains as the things that we think with. But, Burnett points out, almost all of the brain’s activity is automatic. We have little or no control over the way it stores information or responds to stimuli, no more than we control the beating of our heart or the way our liver metabolises waste. It remembers what it wants, how it wants and when it wants. It does this to optimise our chances of survival and reproduction as we live out our lives as small bands of foraging apes beset by countless predators, because, until a very brief moment ago (in evolutionary terms), that is what we were, and our brain still thinks we are.So we get car-sick because our brain doesn’t know about cars: it detects the sensation of movement but knows we aren’t moving and decides we’ve been poisoned so we’d better throw up. It thinks there are deadly spiders, snakes and predators everywhere, so it fills us with anxiety about these threats. And it overreacts to spooky sounds or shadows in the night even though the greatest threats to our lives are from heart disease caused by the fatty and sugary foods the brain encourages us to gorge on because it thinks famine could strike at any time. The incompatibility between the lives our brains think we live and our actual lives in safe, stable modern technological nation states is, Burnett argues, the source of many of our psychological oddities.

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