Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

Naturally there are times when we “just listen” to music, get lost in it, and enter the “flow” of the melody. We are immersed, self-consciousness disappears, and the boundaries between ourselves and the focus of our attention—the music—melt away. Flow can be fabulous. But sometimes we absolutely need reflection and not flow. In many ways I was in t

Naturally there are times when we “just listen” to music, get lost in it, and enter the “flow” of the melody. We are immersed, self-consciousness disappears, and the boundaries between ourselves and the focus of our attention—the music—melt away. Flow can be fabulous. But sometimes we absolutely need reflection and not flow. In many ways I was in t

The good news is that this gives us humans new capacities to think—to imagine, to recombine facts and experiences, to create. The burden is that at times these new capacities allow us to think too much. As far as we know, no other species represents its own neural representations—probably one reason why we sometimes call ourselves “neurotic.”

We come to know our own minds through our interactions with others. Our mirror neuron perceptions, and the resonance they create, act quickly and often outside of awareness.

This “old mammalian brain” works closely with the brainstem and the body proper to create not only our basic drives but also our emotions. These feeling states are filled with a sense of meaning because the limbic regions evaluate our current situation. “Is this good or is this bad?”

to enabling us to pause before we act, have insight and empathy, and enact moral judgments.

Mental activity stimulates brain firing as much as brain firing creates mental activity.

Though the ability to navigate the inner sea of our minds—to have mindsight—is our birthright, and some of us, for reasons that will become clear later, have a lot more of it than others, it does not come automatically, any more than being born with muscles makes us athletes.

(The same crossover is true for our sense of touch, which is represented farther back in the brain, in a zone of the parietal lobe called the “somatosensory strip.”)