Mind Hacks [antikvár]

Foreword Few developments in the brain sciences over the past 20 years have been as crucial as the steady eradication of the brain-as-computer metaphor that dominated so much of our thinking about thinking in the '60s and '70s. Partly the metaphor declined because artificial intelligence turned out to be a vastly more complicated affair than we imagined; partly it declined because we developed new tools for understanding and visualizing the biology of the brain, which didn't look like a microprocessor after all; partly it declined because an influential group of scientists began exploring the vital role of emotion in brain function. It's true the brain contains elements that resemble logic gates of digital computing, and some influential researchers continue to describe the activity of mind as a kind of computation. But for the most part, we now accept the premise that computers and brains are two very different things that happen to share some aptitudes: playing chess, say, or correcting spelling. At first glance, the book you're holding in your hand might be accused of reviving the old brain-as-computer conceit: "hacks" is a software term, after all, and the previous books in the series have all revolved around digital computing in one form or another. But I think this book belongs instead to a distinctly 21st-century way of thinking about the brain, one we might call— in the language of software design—user-centric. The wonders of brain science are no longer something we contemplate exclusively in the lab or the lecture hall; we now explore how the brain works by doing experiments on our own heads. You can explore the architecture and design of your brain just by sampling the many exercises included in the following pages. Consciousness exploration is an old story, of course—one of the oldest—but consciousness exploration with empirical science as your guide is a new one. We've had the age of Freud, of psychedelics, of meditation. This book suggests that a new form of introspection is on the rise, what I've called, in another context, "recreational neuroscience."