The Secret Life of the Mind

by Mariano Sigman

  These principles are very similar to a concept we have already looked at, the memory palace. The construction of memory is more similar to a creative process than to a passive storage of information in nooks and crannies of the brain. The memories become effective, strong and long lasting if they are reorganized into a reasonable visual plot, with a certain logic to the palace’s architectural structure. Now we can extend this idea to all thought. Students, when teaching, are organizing concepts that they’ve already acquired into a new architecture that is more propitious to remembering and, above all, to the construction of new knowledge. They are building their palaces of thought.

  EPILOGUE

  I was about sixteen years old and had just read a very short story that told of a couple who loved each other as intensely as two people could. One evening they make glorious love to each other and then he goes to take a shower. She is smoking in bed, as she savours the love lingering in her body. He has an unexpected, tragic fall, tripping and hitting his head against the bathtub. He dies in silence, without anyone, not even her, realizing it has happened. The story is about that second in which they are barely three feet away from each other, while she is infinitely happy because of the love she feels for him and he is dead. I don’t remember who wrote the story, or the title, just the cheap paper and bad printing of the magazine. Then I came across this same idea in the final story of an anthology edited by Borges and Bioy Casares, entitled ‘The World is Wide and Strange’: ‘They say that Dante, in Chapter 40 of La Vita Nuova, says that when travelling through the streets of Florence he was surprised to find pilgrims who knew nothing of his beloved Beatrice.’

  This book, and perhaps my whole adventure in science, is a way of answering the questions that hover implicit in those texts. I suspect that, in one way or another, we all share that impulse. That is the raison d’être of words, hugs, loves. As well as of quarrels, disputes, jealousy. Our feelings, our beliefs, our ideas are all expressed through the body’s rudimentary language.

  If I were to sum up the idea behind this book in one sentence, it would be the quest to make human thought transparent. From the first page to the last, the search for that transparency is a constant. All of these experiments with babies are designed to better comprehend their desires, needs and virtues, when their lack of language makes them opaque. Understanding how we make decisions, the driving force behind boldness, the reasons for our whims and our beliefs, is a way of removing a layer of opacity from thought itself, which is sometimes hidden beneath the mask of consciousness. And, finally, the pedagogy that is so prominent in the book’s last chapter is, in my view of neuroscience, a human achievement that allows us to come together, to share what we know and what we think. So that the world is less wide and strange.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book is the tale of a journey to the most hidden recesses of our brain and our thoughts, a journey of many years, which I undertook with friends, colleagues and travel companions both on the road and on the road of life.

  I am infinitely grateful to all those in Argentina who accompanied me on the adventure of developing these ideas, and helped me build a profoundly interdisciplinary, provocative and plural space: all the doctoral and postdoctoral students and the researchers at the Integrative Neuroscience Laboratory at the Faculty of Natural and Exact Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires and the Neuroscience Laboratory at the Torcuato Di Tella University. I would also like to thank my colleagues and companions in New York and Paris, with whom these ideas continued to take shape. The concepts I discuss in this book were originally moulded with Gabriel Mindlin, Marcelo Magnasco, Charles Gilbert, Torsten Wiesel, Guillermo Cecchi, Michael Posner, Leopoldo Petreanu, Pablo Meyer Rojas, Eugenia Chiappe, Ramiro Freudenthal, Lucas Sigman, Martín Berón de Astrada, Stanislas Dehaene, Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, Tristán Bekinschtein, Inés Samengo, Marcelo Rubinstein, Diego Golombek, Draulio Araujo, Kathinka Evers, Andrea P. Goldin, Cecilia Inés Calero, Diego Shalom, Diego Fernández Slezak, María Juliana Leone, Carlos Diuk, Ariel Zylberberg, Juan Frenkel, Pablo Barttfeld, Andrés Babino, Sidarta Ribeiro, Marcela Peña, David Klahr, Alejandro Maiche, Juan Valle Lisboa, Jacques Mehler, Marina Nespor, Antonio Battro, Andrea Moro, Sidney Strauss, John Bruer, Susan Fitzpatrick, Marcos Trevisan, Sebastián Lipina, Bruno Mesz, Mariano Sardon, Horacio Sbaraglia, Albert Costa, Silvia Bunge, Jacobo Sitt, Andrés Rieznik, Gustavo Faigenbaum, Rafael Di Tella, Iván Reydel, Elizabeth Spelke, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Andrew Meltzoff, Manuel Carreiras, Michael Shadlen and John Duncan. I am grateful to my dad, for sharing his love and passion for psychiatry and for the study and comprehension of the human mind. My reading of Freud’s works, with his handwritten annotations and underlining, lies at the heart of this project.

  The foundations of this book have been in my brain–which according to its Spanish etymology means ‘what’s carried inside the head’–for years. But bringing it to fruition was an extraordinary adventure, and much more challenging and thrilling than I had imagined. And, of course, it would not have been possible without many people’s support along the way. I want to thank them now, as I approach the finishing line. First of all, Florencia Ure and Roberto Montes, my publishers, who were at the start of this story. Roberto, in that first meeting–which seems an eternity ago–said in passing that the key was writing an honest book. Those casually spoken words resonated with me for a long time, like an anchor, as I gave shape to this project, and I endeavoured to do just that. Florencia Grieco accompanied me–both by my side and as the wind at my back–in the editing of the text. Countless meetings, emails, matés and coffees, with much back and forth during which I learned from her how to shape these ideas. Marcos Trevisan, my companion on so many adventures, saw me through this one with extraordinary patience. He taught me to read aloud and to think about the history behind words, and, above all, made me laugh during the most arduous stretches of writing. In the final sprint, Andre Goldin showed infinite generosity, enduring my giddy days and insomniac nights, as we went over both the science and the form of the book. Christián Carman revised historical and philosophical passages. Many thanks as well to the guys at El Gato y La Caja, Juan Manuel Garrido, Facundo Álvarez Heduan and Pablo González, and to Andrés Rieznik, Cecilia Calero, Pablo Polosecki, Mercedes Dalessandro, Hugo Sigman, Silvia Gold, Juan Sigman and Claire Landmann, who read these pages and gave me their notes, observations and the occasional hug, which helped me to keep on rowing even when the wind was blowing hard.

  In this book I have expressed the view of many scientists and philosophers who argue that language is not only a vehicle to convey thoughts, but also a tool to shape them. Even our moral judgements depend on the language in which they are presented. This book was first conceived in Spanish and then rewritten in English. I experienced this process as much more than a mere translation; it was a revision that was only possible by rethinking this book from the (quite imperfect) expressions of a distant language.

  This journey from Spain and Latin America to the rest of the world began in New York and was made possible thanks to my agent, Max Brockman, to whom I am infinitely grateful. Then I had the enormous fortune to work closely with Mara Faye Lethem who translated the book to English and who, with Betina Gonzalez, an author I greatly admire, helped me with the final cut of The Secret Life of the Mind. I am honored to have this book published in the United States by Little, Brown and Company, and I am deeply thankful to Tracy Behar, my U.S. editor, and Ian Straus.

  And from New York and Buenos Aires to London, to all my British companions at HarperCollins. Thanks to Lottie Fyfe, Katherine Patrick, Mark Handsley, and special thanks to Arabella Pike, my wonderful editor, for making me understand–or feel–the meaning of ‘you’ll never walk alone’.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Mariano Sigman, PhD, a physicist by training, is a leading international figure in the cognitive neuroscience of learning and decision-making. His awards include a Human Frontier Career Development Award, the National Prize of Physics
, the Pius XI Medal from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Young Investigator Prize of the Collège de France, and the IBM Scalable Data Analytics for a Smarter Planet Innovation Award.

  APPENDIX

  The geography of the brain

  It is useful, when studying the brain, to divide it into different regions. Some of them are delineated by grooves or clefts. Using this method, the cerebral cortex, which includes the entire surface of the cerebral hemispheres, can be divided into four large regions: frontal, parietal, occipital and temporal. The parietal and frontal cortices, for example, are separated by the central sulcus. Each of these large regions of the cortex takes part in multiple functions but, at the same time, has a certain degree of specialization. The frontal cortex functions as the brain’s ‘control tower’. Without it, for example, we would be unable to refrain from eating in a situation in which we know it is not good for us (although we are hungry). The frontal cortex regulates, inhibits and operates different cerebral processes, and makes plans. The occipital cortex manages visual perception. The parietal cortex integrates and coordinates sensorial information with actions. It accounts for our ability to catch a ball by guiding our movements using in-real-time information about its speed and its trajectory. And the temporal cortex encodes memories, and works as a bridge between vision, hearing and language.

  These large regions are in turn divided according to anatomical criteria or functional roles. For example, the motor cortex is the area of the frontal cortex that manages the muscles, and the somatosensory cortex is the area in the parietal cortex that coordinates tactile perception.

  In the fissure that separates the two hemispheres of the brain, we can identify subdivisions of the frontal cortex. For example, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the orbitofrontal cortex are involved in different aspects of decision-making such as encoding the value and the risk of different options. The cingulate cortex extends beneath the frontal and parietal cortices. The section closest to the forehead (anterior cingulate) plays a primordial role in the ability to monitor and control our actions. For instance, when you realize you have made a mistake just after making an action, it is because the anterior cingulate has signalled it. On the other hand, the posterior cingulate (the part closest to the nape) activates when your mind wanders or when you are daydreaming. Finally, in the centre of the brain is the thalamus, which turns off when you are asleep or under anaesthesia, and it turns on when you wake up.

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