But what is bizarre is that somehow, this big, slushy, organic web of interconnections is what we call “me.” Along with the many illusions of the human brain, it’s all of our hopes, dreams, aspirations, our agony, and our ecstasies, all contained together in this little blob.

Essentially this most complicated system runs entirely under the hood of our conscious awareness, totally invisible to us. In fact, if it weren’t for the study of the brain, we wouldn’t even have any reason to suspect the existence of the electrical signals or impulses behind the simplest things we do from making our morning coffee or recognizing an old friend to the more complicated stuff like judging a character or driving a car.

Here’s the Interesting Part About the Illusions of the Human Brain

In one of the studies, pictures of women who exhibited dilated pupils were uniformly rated as more appealing by men than the ones with narrower pupils. None of those men had consciously noted the difference in the pupil’s size, nor did they know that larger pupils were a sign of biological readiness for sexual intimacy in women. But their gooey gray matter knew this and whoop, here they were, making decisions totally unaware of what’s influencing their behavior. All masked under the great illusions of the human brain.

Illusions of the Human Brain – The Unconscious

Since everything we do runs under the hood, this leads to the idea of the unconscious brain. The part of us that flickers to life at the first light of the day, the conscious mind, is like a stockpile cabin on a trans-Atlantic ship assuming credit for the whole journey. Little does it know about the colossal engineering that’s underneath.

It appears as though our unconscious mind tremendously influences all our decisions and choices made in life. As an example, if your parents had named you Dennis or Denise, your likelihood of becoming a dentist would be statistically higher. Psychologists refer to this as “implicit egotism,” which means we like things that remind us of ourselves. As a matter of fact, as arbitrary as it may sound, we also tend to like people better if they share our birthday!

We humans seem to continually construct sketchy narratives of the past and fool ourselves into believing that it’s true. As Carl Jung put it, “in each of us there is another whom we do not know,” or as Pink Floyd said, “there’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.”

Here’s another example of a study that psychologists call the “Halo effect.” If you find a baseball pitcher to be good looking or athletic, you are more likely to rank him better at pitching too. If you feel a player is unsightly or ugly, you will most likely devalue his athletic ability. The statement “Hitler loves dogs, and little children” will always sound controversial no matter how often you hear it. Any element of kindness in someone so vicious ruptures the probability constructed by the halo effect.

What’s the Fetch?

If there’s so much going on under our hoods, it makes us wonder then, what our responsibility is to the world or the social system. Well, along with a lot of ideas such as “tailored education” and “tailored social policies,” there have also been considerations on reevaluating our ways of dealing with criminals through adapting the concept of “rational sentencing,” with addicts through “customized rehabilitation” and employees via “realistic incentive structuring.”

So, Are We Really Who We Think We Are?

Whether we have free will or not, remains a hotly debated topic even today, but what is very clear is that the unconscious mind is the one that’s in charge, and the conscious bit on top is not the one driving the boat. We are tied to our biology, and free will seems to be a very small player behind the wheel.

This idea may be a little scary for a lot of us. Nonetheless, we need to remind ourselves that when humankind discovered other planets and felt dethroned from the position of being center of the universe, we also saw the upside – the whole world was so much grander and more wondrous than we thought. The same thing is happening today in cognitive science; we are sailing into this inner cosmos of alien life forms and are realizing that it’s so much grander and wondrous than we could have ever imagined!