“The human brain is a master of deception. It creates experiences and directs actions with a magician’s skill, never revealing how it does so, all the while giving us a false sense of confidence that its products—our day-to-day experiences—reveal its inner workings. Joy, sadness, surprise, fear, and other emotions seem so distinct and feel so built-in that we assume they have separate causes inside us. When you have a brain that essentializes, it’s easy to come up with a wrong theory of the mind. We are, after all, a bunch of brains trying to figure out how brains work.”

Excerpt From: Lisa Feldman Barrett. “How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.”

“There’s a famous quote that says, ‘If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.’ If you look into the science of the brain and how it relates to intelligence, there’s a strong element of truth in this aphorism. Our brains make us intelligent enough to recognise that we are intelligent, observant enough to realise this isn’t typical in the world, and curious enough to wonder why this is the case. But we don’t yet seem to be intelligent enough to grasp easily where our intelligence comes from and how it works. So we have to fall back on studies of the brain and psychology to get any idea of how the whole process comes about. Science itself exists thanks to our intelligence, and now we use science to figure out how our intelligence works? This is either very efficient or circular reasoning, I’m not smart enough to tell.”

Excerpt From: Dean Burnett. “The Idiot Brain.”