p.3 What exactly is a thought? [JLJ - what exactly is a thought about a thought?]

p.4 most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control. The vast jungles of neurons operate their own programs.

p.5 Brains are in the business of gathering information and steering behavior appropriately. It doesn't matter whether consciousness is involved in the decision making. And most of the time, it's not... Our brains run mostly on autopilot, and the conscious mind has little access to the giant and mysterious factory that runs below it.
 You see evidence of this when... your nervous system gives you a "hunch" about which choice you should make.

p.7 In 1862, the Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell developed a set of fundamental equations that unified electricity and magnetism. On his deathbed, he coughed up a strange sort of confession, declaring that "something within him" discovered the famous equations, not he. He admitted he had no idea how the ideas actually came to him - they simply came to him.

p.7 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe claimed to have written his novella The Sorrows of Young Werther with practically no conscious input, as though he were holding a pen that moved on its own.

p.8 Almost the entirety of what happens in your mental life is not under your conscious control, and the truth is that it's better this way.

p.9 One does not need to be consciously aware to perform sophisticated motor acts.

p.9 The conscious mind is not at the center of the action in the brain; instead it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity.

p.15 Johannes Peter Muller (1801-1858) [thought that] we are not directly aware of the outside world, but only of the signals in the nervous system. In other words, when the nervous system tells you that something is "out there" - such as a light - that is what you will believe

p.21 We are astoundingly poor observers. And our introspection is useless on these issues: we believe we're seeing the world just fine until it's called to our attention that we're not.

p.22 The job of a headline is to give a tightly compressed summary. In the same manner, consciousness is a way of projecting all the activity in your nervous system into a simpler form... combining information, making predictions about what is coming next, making decisions about what to do now. In the face of this complexity, consciousness gives you a summary that is useful for the larger picture

p.22-23 It may come as a surprise that about one-third of the human brain is devoted to vision... Strictly speaking, all visual scenes are ambiguous

p.24 Wherever you cast your eyes appears to be in sharp focus, and therefore you assume the whole visual world is in focus... because you can always aim your eyes wherever you're interested, you're normally not the least bit aware that there are boundaries beyond which you have no vision.

p.26 to see an object change, you must attend to it.
 You are not seeing the world in the rich detail that you implicitly believed you were; in fact, you are not aware of most of what hits your eyes.

p.27 The brain doesn't need a full model of the world because it merely needs to figure out, on the fly, where to look, and when... your brain... only needs to know how and where to search when it wants something in particular.

p.28 The brain generally does not need to know most things; it merely knows how to go out and retrieve the data. It computes on a need-to-know basis... we are not conscious of much of anything until we ask ourselves about it... we see only what we need to know, and no more.

p.30 brains reach out into the world and actively extract the type of information they need... it only needs to know where to go to find the information.

p.33 You're not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.

p.33 Hermann von Helmholtz... concluded that the brain must make assumptions about the incoming data, and these these assumptions are based on our previous experience.

p.38 the brain has to learn how to see.

p.39 the conscious experience of vision occurs only when there is accurate prediction of sensory consequences

p.40 your own sense of vision is carried by nothing but millions of nerve signals that just happen to travel along different cables. Your brain is encased in absolute blackness in the vault of your skull. It doesn't see anything. All it knows are these little signals, and nothing else. And yet you perceive the world in all shades of brightness and colors. Your brain is in the dark but your mind constructs light.

p.44 The brain is properly thought of as a mostly closed system that runs on its own internally generated activity... the internal data is not generated by external sensory data but merely modulated by it.

p.45 The deep secret of the brain is that... internally generated activity is modulated by sensory input.

p.46 what we call normal perception does not really differ from hallucinations, except that the latter are not anchored by external input.

p.49 perception reflects the active comparison of sensory inputs with internal predictions... awareness of your surroundings occurs only when sensory inputs violate expectations.

p.53 The best way to calibrate timing expectations of incoming signals is to interact with the world

p.54 we are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them... what we perceive in the outside world is generated by parts of the brain to which we do not have access.

p.58 There can be a large gap between knowledge and awareness.

p.59 unconscious learning: essentially everything about your interaction with the world rests on this process.

p.70 Consciousness is the long-term planner, the CEO of the company, while most of the day-to-day operations are run by all those parts of her brain to which she has no access.

p.71 if you ever learned to ride a bike... After some time, the skill became like a reflex. It became automatized... The details became no longer conscious and no longer accessible.

p.71 One of the most impressive features of brains - and especially human brains - is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes its way... This flexibility of learning accounts for a large part of what we consider human intelligence. While many animals are properly called intelligent, humans distinguish themselves in that thay are so flexibly intelligent, fashioning their neural circuits to match the tasks at hand.

p.73 This trick of burning tasks into the circuitry is fundamental to how brains operate: they change the circuit board of their machinery to mold themselves to their mission... In the logic of the brain, if you don't have the right tool for the job, create it.

p.77 What you are able to experience is completely limited by your biology... In 1909, the Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexküll began to notice that different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on different signals from their environment... So von Uexküll introduced a new concept: the part that you are able to see is known as the umwelt... and the bigger reality... is known as the umgebung.
 Each organism has its own umwelt, which it presumably assumes to be the entire objective reality "out there." Why would we ever stop to think that there is more beyond what we can sense? [JLJ - I am depressed. I have determined that my umwelt is not the umgebung. Now what am I going to do?]

p.82 Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.

p.88 "instinct blindness": we are not able to see the instincts that are the very engines of our behavior. These programs are inaccessible to us not because they are unimportant, but because they are critical. Conscious meddling would do nothing to improve them.

p.89 We live inside the umwelt of our instincts, and we typically have as little perception of them as the fish does of water.

p.105 Minsky suggested that human minds may be collections of enormous numbers of machinelike, connected subagents that are themselves mindless. The key idea is that a great number of small, specialized workers can give rise to something like a society, with all its rich properties that no single subagent, alone, possesses. Minsky wrote, "Each mental agent by itself can only do some simple thing that needs no mind or thought at all. Yet when we join these agents in societies - in certain very special ways - this leads to intelligence."

p.107 The missing factor in Minsky's theory was competition among experts who all believe they know the right way to solve the problem... There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behavior. As a result, you can accomplish the strange feats of arguing with yourself, cursing at yourself, and cajoling yourself to do something - feats that modern computers simply do not do.

p.108 Brains... are machines made of conflicting parts.

p.109 I propose that the brain is best understood as a team of rivals... remember that competing factions typically have the same goal - success for the country - but they often have different ways of going about it.

p.110 brains are made of competing subsystems.

p.111 emotional networks are absolutely required to rank your possible next actions in the world

p.127 biology rarely rests with a single solution. Instead, it tends to ceaselessly reinvent solutions. But why endlessly innovate - why not find a good solution and move on? ...I propose that this moving on is a major reason artificial intelligence has become stuck... this is how it goes with clever mechanisms in biology: when we keep looking, we find more. Biology never checks off a problem and calls it quits. It reinvents solutions continually. The end product of that approach is a highly overlapping system of solutions - the necessary condition for a team-of-rivals architechture.

p.129 Cognitive reserve - and robustness in general - is achieved by blanketing a problem with overlapping solutions.

p.130 The team-of-rivals framework presents a model of the brain that possesses multiple ways of representing the same stimulus.

p.132 we harbor mechanical, "alien" subroutines to which we have no access and of which we have no acquaintance. Almost all of our actions - from producing speech to picking up a mug of coffee - are run by alien subroutines, also known as zombie systems.

p.134 Hidden programs drive actions, and the left hemisphere makes justifications. This idea of retrospective storytelling suggests that we come to know our own attitudes and emotions, at least partially, by inferring them from observations of our own behavior.

p.137 Fabrication of stories is one of the key businesses in which our brains engage.

p.138-139 Minds seek patterns... they are driven toward "patternicity" - the attempt to find structure in meaningless data.

p.140 consciousness exists to control - and to distribute control over - the automated alien systems.

p.141 If you think you're consciously aware of most of what surrounds you, think again... Your zombie systems are experts at taking care of business as usual.

p.142 Consciousness is called in during the first phase of learning and is excluded from the game playing after it is deep in the system... the purpose of consciousness seems to be this: an animal composed of a giant collection of zombie systems would be energy efficient but cognitively inflexible. It would have economical programs for doing particular, simple tasks, but it wouldn't have rapid ways of switching between programs or setting goals to become expert in novel and unexpected tasks.

p.147 When I was a child, I assumed that we would have robots by now - robots that would bring us food and clean our clothes and converse with us. But something went wrong with the field of artificial intelligence... Why did artificial intelligence become stuck? The answer is clear: intelligence has proven itself a tremendously hard problem. Nature has had an opportunity to try out trillions of experiments over billions of years. Humans have been scratching at the problem only for decades... To make meaningful progress in building thinking robots, it is now clear that we need to decipher the tricks nature has figured out.

p.147 I suggest that the team-of-rivals framework will play an important role in dislodging the jammed field of artificial intelligence.

p.148 As the biologist Leslie Orgel's second law states: "Evolution is smarter than you are." If I had a law of biology, it would be: "Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don't stop."

p.148-149 As the French essayist Michel de Montaigne put it, "There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and others." [JLJ - part of me agrees with this statement, while part of me disagrees]

p.193 A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves. [JLJ - I will make a note that this statement is interesting, but only if and when I am able to get my attention in order to make the request to do so.]

p.208 invisibly small changes inside the brain can cause massive changes to behavior.