What if most of your thoughts and actions happen without your awareness? Could this mean that free will is just an illusion?
David Eagleman’s Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain reveals how your unconscious mind dominates nearly everything you do. Eagleman’s findings challenge fundamental beliefs about human agency and decision-making.
Read more to discover why this Stanford neuroscientist believes these insights could revolutionize our approach to personal responsibility.
Overview of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
David Eagleman’s Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (published in 2011) explores a disconcerting concept—that the vast majority of your brain activity is unconscious and outside of your control. Comprising the bulk of your mental activity, the unconscious mind creates your perception of reality, allows you to perform complex actions without thinking about them, and makes snap judgments and decisions you’re unaware of. Because of this, Eaglemen challenges the assumption that humans have free will—which, he argues, opens up important questions about criminal justice and prisoner rehabilitation.
Eagleman is a neuroscience researcher at Stanford University and the cofounder of two companies, Neosensory and Braincheck, that are integrating his research into new technologies. He also directs the Center for Science and Law, a nonprofit using neuroscience to improve the justice system through initiatives like innovative rehabilitation programs for prisoners.
We’ll discuss Eagleman’s ideas in his book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain in three parts:
Part 1: Your Conscious and Unconscious Mind explores your mind’s conscious and unconscious systems for navigating the world.
Part 2: How the Two Parts Work Together dives into the interaction between your conscious and unconscious systems, and the role each one plays in creating your experience.
Part 3: Free Will and the Justice System discusses Eagleman’s argument that humans lack free will, along with his recommendations for a new rehabilitative approach to criminal justice.
Throughout, our commentary will take a deeper look at the neuroscientific research behind his ideas and explore other perspectives on criminal justice.
Part 1: Your Conscious and Unconscious Mind
The brain is one of the most powerful and mysterious parts of the human body. Eagleman sheds light on how this organ functions by distinguishing between two types of mental activity: conscious and unconscious. In this section, we’ll explore the differences between them.
Your Conscious Mind
Eagleman explains that your conscious mind is the part of your mind that you’re aware of. This includes your current thoughts as well as the input from your senses that you experience as the world around you. The conscious mind is what most people consider to be their “self,” the part that they believe is making decisions and controlling their behavior.
The key strength of the conscious mind is its problem-solving ability and its flexibility to learn new things. It’s hard at work whenever you’re learning a new skill or dealing with an unexpected event. For example, the first time you try to paint a landscape, you may need to think carefully about each brushstroke. As you make mistakes and learn from them, you consciously adjust your technique, and your brain forms new neural connections as you improve your painting skills.
Your Unconscious Mind
On the other hand, your unconscious mind carries out all of the processes that your conscious mind isn’t aware of. This includes automatic functions like breathing and circulating blood, as well as a wide range of cognitive activities like recognizing patterns, forming memories, and performing learned actions like balancing on a bicycle. Eagleman asserts that your unconscious mind is a vast network of different overlapping processes with varying purposes. These processes make up the vast majority of your mental activity.
Eagleman highlights two distinct advantages of your unconscious mind: efficiency and speed.
1) Efficiency
The key strength and evolutionary purpose of the unconscious mind is efficiency. Since conscious brain activity takes more physical energy than automatic activity, your brain can operate more efficiently by shifting as many tasks as possible to the unconscious realm. For example, if you had to think through the steps of tying your shoes every time you did so, it would take forever and use lots of brain power. So, once you’ve learned that skill, the brain shifts it to the unconscious—allowing you to tie your shoes quickly and without focusing your attention on the task.
Eagleman adds that some of these unconscious actions are so essential for human survival that they’re preprogrammed from the moment we’re born. These include things like recognizing human faces and breathing—instincts that are too important to leave up to individuals to actively learn.
2) Speed
Eagleman also explains that your unconscious mind acts much more quickly than your conscious mind. This is highly valuable in situations where you need to act immediately. For example, if you see a child falling off a nearby stool, your unconscious mind may compel you to grab them before your conscious brain knows what’s happening.
Part 2: Why Your Unconscious Mind Is in Charge
While the two parts of the brain work in tandem, Eagleman argues that the unconscious is responsible for the vast majority of your perceptions and behavior—so much so that humans lack free will entirely. In this section, we’ll explore the different ways your unconscious mind determines your perceptions, judgments, and behaviors, and we’ll take a closer look at Eagleman’s argument that humans lack free will.
Your Unconscious Mind Creates Your Perception
Eagleman argues that your unconscious mind creates your perception of reality. First, he explains that your unconscious brain decides what you pay attention to in the world around you. It actively seeks information that’s relevant to its current activity and ignores everything else. You can think of it as a filter that determines the breadth of your conscious awareness. So while you’re driving, you might be paying close attention to traffic, pedestrians, and road signs, but you’d have very little awareness of irrelevant information, like how your clothing feels.
If your brain only retrieves select information from the world around you, then why does your experience of reality feel so immersive and complete? Eagleman explains that this is because your unconscious mind constantly fills the gaps in your perception by running a simulation of reality based on the sensory information it receives. Whenever you look at something, your brain automatically predicts what you’re going to see next—for example, you might expect to see a light switch to the left of your doorway because that’s where it’s always been.
Eagleman adds that your unconscious simulation keeps itself current. If your prediction is wrong and you receive sensory input that defies your expectations, your brain recalibrates its simulation of reality and creates a new prediction to accommodate this new information. For example, if you wake up to find that the light switch is suddenly on the other side of the doorway, your brain integrates its new location into your working model of reality. This way, your simulation reflects your moment-to-moment experience.
Your Unconscious Mind Creates Your Judgments
Eagleman also argues that your unconscious mind forms your attitudes and judgments about the world. You may think you’re consciously judging aspects of your experience (for example, whether a piece of meat is rotten or if someone might make a good friend). But Eagleman explains that your conscious impressions of the world are based on brief highlights from powerful and sophisticated unconscious processes beyond your control. When you smell a piece of meat to check if it’s still good, your unconscious brain analyzes the chemicals you inhale and compares them to those of past meat you’ve eaten in a matter of milliseconds. Meanwhile, the only message that reaches your conscious mind is “Gross, don’t eat that!”
These same unconscious processes allow you to form judgments about potential friends, romantic partners, purchases, and so on. They also underlie any “hunches” or “gut feeling”—both of which are simply terms for when your unconscious mind has come to a conclusion without your conscious mind knowing how.
Your Unconscious Mind Controls Your Behavior
Eagleman also asserts that your behavior and decisions are ultimately controlled by unconscious processes. He explains that every aspect of your experience is the result of physical goings-on in your brain. While you experience yourself as making decisions with your conscious mind, Eagleman suggests this is an illusion—even conscious decisions are determined by neurological processes over which you have little control.
To demonstrate how your decisions and behavior are determined by unconscious processes, Eagleman points out research indicating that your brain begins making a decision before you’re consciously aware of what you’ve chosen to do. Therefore, your conscious mind doesn’t actually “choose” what you do. He also highlights that people with Tourette’s syndrome experience themselves performing actions without their own consent, including facial expressions and outbursts of inappropriate language. This further undermines the belief that your behavior begins when you consciously choose to perform an action.
In addition to affecting individual decisions, Eagleman points out that a change to your physical brain can have a profound influence on your behavior. For example, some medications are known to decrease the user’s impulse control, leading to compulsive gambling, shopping, or drug use. People who suffer brain injuries have also shown dramatic behavioral changes, reinforcing the idea that it’s your unconscious brain that determines what you do, not your conscious self.
Humans Lack Free Will
According to Eagleman, the fact that your behavior is controlled by your unconscious has startling and profound implications. Most of us assume we have free will—we’re autonomous agents who direct our own lives by making decisions based on reason or an inner voice. However, Eagleman argues that since your conscious mind can’t exist or function independently of your brain’s physical processes, you can’t have free will—there’s nothing “free” about decision-making processes directed by neurobiology. As we’ll see later in the guide, this has broad ramifications for the criminal justice system.
Your Conscious Mind Can Train Your Unconscious
While your unconscious mind is largely in control, there is one important way for your conscious mind to influence your behavior. Eagleman explains that your conscious mind can train your unconscious processes through intentional practice. Recall that the brain transfers frequently performed tasks to the unconscious so you don’t have to expend mental energy on them. According to Eagleman, this means that you can make conscious decisions about which activities to practice often enough that they become deeply engrained in your unconscious mind—so deeply engrained that you can then perform them automatically.
As an example of a trained unconscious behavior, when someone is first learning how to type, they may have to look at the keyboard to remember where all of the keys are. They consciously decide to make a deliberate effort to practice typing. As they practice, their unconscious mind begins to remember where all the letters are, and eventually they can type entire words without looking at the keys or thinking about individual letters.
Part 3: Reforming The Criminal Justice System
Eagleman argues that humans’ lack of free will has drastic implications for the criminal justice system. Historically, criminals have been sentenced on the assumption that they’re rational actors in control of their actions, and therefore need to be punished in proportion to their culpability. However, Eagleman says that since this assumption is false, the criminal justice system should treat criminals as if they’re incapable of choosing differently.
Eagleman argues that instead of punishing criminals, incarceration should aim to reform them so they can be released back into society without reoffending. He says this approach is not only more humane, but it also has the potential to make society safer by preventing first-time offenders from committing additional crimes.
Let’s take a look at how the ideal criminal justice system would work according to Eagleman.
How to Reform the Criminal Mind
Eagleman argues that because a criminal’s unconscious brain led them to commit their crimes, their reform should consist of retraining their unconscious. (Recall that the conscious mind has the ability to train the unconscious mind to make certain decisions and enact certain behaviors via conscious practice.)
Since poor impulse control is a trait widely shared by criminals, Eagleman argues that their criminal tendencies could be curtailed by strengthening their prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain most directly responsible for impulse control. His rehabilitation plan consists of exercises that increase connections and neural activity in this part of the brain, strengthening the criminal’s capacity to regulate their behavior.
He highlights one potential exercise: The incarcerated person is presented with an image of something that would normally tempt them, like an unattended purse. A scan of their brain measures the activity that accompanies their impulsive response. The prisoner is then responsible for figuring out a way to lower the activity associated with that temptation while their trainer continues the scan. According to Eagleman, repeating this exercise will strengthen the criminal’s unconscious ability to resist impulsive behaviors over time.
Conditions for Release
Eagleman argues that once a criminal has been reformed, they should be quickly released. He explains that the justice system serves to protect the general population by isolating those who might cause harm to others—and once a criminal has been reformed, they no longer need to be contained. Therefore, only those who continue to pose a real danger should remain incarcerated for the long term.
How do we determine whether someone is reformed or is likely to reoffend? Eagleman argues that we should no longer rely on the intuitions and predictions of parole officers and specialists, as studies have shown these to be inaccurate. Instead, he recommends developing statistical models and gathering data to identify risk factors that will help to accurately calculate the probability of someone reoffending.
Furthermore, he argues that we should consider how well individual criminals respond to rehabilitation. Those who take well to treatments like the prefrontal cortex exercises should be released sooner as they’d be less likely to reoffend, while those who struggle to modify their behavior may need to be incarcerated for longer.
