Table of Contents

Preface ............................................................................ v
Acknowledgements .......................................................... x
Introduction ..................................................................... 1
Neuroplasticity - The Brain’s Way of Adapting to Change
A Miracle Child .......................................................... 3
Rewiring the Brain ..................................................... 5
The Brains of London Cabbies ..................................... 8
Does Innate Talent Exist? ......................................... 13
Keeping the Balance ................................................ 15
Habits
“The Living Dead” .................................................... 18
Multi-tasking with Two Systems ............................... 19
We Are Not In Control of Ourselves .......................... 23
Eating Without Thinking........................................... 26
Practice Makes Perfect ............................................ 30
Nine Brains, Nine Perspectives, One Octopus ............. 31
Is This Hand Really Mine? ......................................... 34
Imagination Can Go A Long Way
Being Present in the Game ....................................... 40
Training Your Imagination ........................................ 41
Imagining the Way to Recovery ................................ 45
 I Have the Power to Control You ............................... 47
Ctrl C Ctrl V ............................................................. 50
Acchi Muite Hoi....................................................... 51
YAWN! ................................................................... 53
“I Feel You”: The Truth Behind Empathy .................... 54
Recognition and Autism ........................................... 57
How We Perceive The World
More Than Meets the Eye ........................................ 61
Two Thinking Systems .............................................. 63
Losing Our Minds .................................................... 67
Storyteller of Dreams............................................... 70
Reason to Dream..................................................... 75
Ways to Picture ....................................................... 77
Hallucinations ......................................................... 80
Out of Focus ........................................................... 84
Trusting Your Gut Feelings
Hidden Messages and Marketing Scams .................... 88
The Power of Thin-slicing ......................................... 93
“Feels Like Home” ................................................... 97
Not Just a 3-Pound Organ .............................................. 101
Epilogue ...................................................................... 103
Notes.......................................................................... 105
 v

Preface

Three years ago, 14-year-old me entered a contemporary

bookstore in Taipei. I skimmed through the book
columns, ironically disregarding the Chinese titles while
searching specifically for the English covers which
presented a “scientific aesthetic”. I do not recall why I
was looking for such a book, only that I had felt slight
despair over the fact that I knew very little about Biology
at that point even though I wanted to pursue this subject
in the future. A book caught my eye through the cover’s
complementary blue-orange theme contrasted against a
white background. This book was Neurologic, written by
the neurologist Eliezer J. Sternberg.1 The cover
illustration was quite simple: a side view of the human
head with the upper half of the cerebrum replaced by
ominous hardware.
Maybe it was my contentment from eating a delicious
pork belly bun not too long ago or simply the
cinematically quiet atmosphere of the bookstore that
made me reach out for that book and read the first few
pages. I was instantly hooked. Dr. Sternberg had a knack
for stimulating intellectual curiosity through his tendency
to ask questions throughout the book while using simple
language and analogies to explain complex mechanisms
 vi

in the human brain. Truly, his writing motivated me to

think deeply about foreign topics and even paradoxically
question my capacity to think about my own thinking.
Now as a 17-year-old, I see that my despair of knowing
“too little” about science back then wasn’t caused by a
subconscious flight or freeze response to the overload of
scientific literature, but by my fear of never being able to
see the wider scope of biological phenomena once I
dived deep into just one topic. I needed a trigger to
counter that fear. That trigger was Neurologic.
I bought the book that summer and spent most of my
time reading it. I remember noting possible implications
of Dr. Sternberg’s ideas when applied to a different
context. I remember thinking how funny it was for my
brain to be learning about itself. I remember the time
when I imagined having the brains of an octopus until my
real brain hurt. Dr. Sternberg’s book led me down a
rabbit hole of thought on consciousness. I felt miserable
not being able to share my thoughts with my peers. Soon,
I developed ideas about human behaviour from the lens
of a high school student, many of which were extensions
of ideas from Neurologic. Perhaps it was the inability to
contain my excitement that led me to ultimately write
my own book as a 12-week school “Discovery U” course
while staying abroad in Hangzhou.
 vii

Writing the book that you’re reading right now was

truly the first time I had seriously poured the heart of my
own thinking into words. I felt like I could sit down and
type for hours without noticing the time. Some call this
“flow”, but my parents and I call it insanity. Sadly, I now
realise that my ambitious ideas about neuroscience were
all concentrated in the fleeting days of writing this book,
a one-off lively opportunity just like my nostalgic study
abroad experience. I am glad to have captured the
curious mind of that 14-year-old girl who later became
15 when publishing the PDF version of this book online.
Later that year, I was very grateful to receive my
school’s “Discovery U” award in recognition of my work.
However, the real reward for me was seeing my peers,
teachers, and family members get excited about what we
know about the nervous system and the mind as well as
what we don’t know.
Now that I’m 17 years old, I see a new purpose in
having written this book in addition to my original goal.
That is to preserve the memories of my younger self,
especially my old way of thinking. I am aware that by
editing parts of my work now (as much as I want to
rewrite many long-winded paragraphs and disagree with
a whole section of what I said), I would be losing the
essence of my old way of thinking. Thus, I will not tamper
with my previous ideations. I often ask myself the
 viii

question “did I really write this?” out of disbelief,

because I had forgotten much of how I used to think
about psychological concepts and daily observations to
be frank. Hence, reading my own book feels like reading
the work of someone else. This goes to show that writing
something when you’re older doesn’t mean it will be
better. The mind that I had in the past seems to be very
different from the one I have now.
Reflecting back on this book 2 years after publication,
I realise that the mind may not just differ by person but
also by age, making the mind all the more precious and
ephemeral. Your world may look different from how my
brain projects it, and my way of thinking may be
completely different from how you think. We may not
even agree with the same definition for these terms
depending on how we experience them. Who says that
only those who study neuroscience or psychology are
justifiable enough to think about the mind when we all
have one? Never underestimate your unique ability to
think, predict, and perceive.
There is one more thing I must point out. I wrote this
book largely under the naive thought that only the
nervous system and environmental stimuli influenced
observable human behaviour. I was wrong. I found out
many months later through separate books and papers
that there is a pool of budding research on how different
 ix

bodily systems like the digestive system could influence

our cognition and therefore our behaviour. However, my
younger self’s scope of thinking was reduced down to the
nervous system. I hope my current study in DP Biology as
a senior high school student will help me to widen my
scope to consider other bodily systems, which will
provide a more holistic approach of viewing behaviour
and illnesses.
Nevertheless, I still enjoy viewing the complexity of
emergent behaviours by considering many different
external and internal factors possibly influencing a given
situation --- some of my friends find it strange when I tell
them that I enjoy observing their interactions with their
surroundings.
Not knowing about other bodily systems three years
ago was arguably an advantage for me to stay focused on
my neuroscience exploration without experiencing
“information overload”. As you will later find by reading
the introduction to this book, my younger self would
agree with me that not knowing the answers to some of
my most burning questions is quite thrilling. “Asking
questions is more important than finding answers,” my
humanities teacher Ms. Shepherd once said.

Melle Hsing
Hong Kong, February 2021
 x

Acknowledgements
There were so many people who supported me along the
way to whom I must show my gratitude. I must first thank
Dr. Sternberg for being the inspiration behind this book.
Your fascination and knowledge on neuroscience and
neurological disorders seeped through the pages of
Neurologic and gave me a perfect foundation to research
further.
Thank you to Miss Ishita Kumar for illustrating the
beautiful book cover. I was very excited to see how
someone other than myself viewed the mind and the
ideas within this book from a creative perspective.
Thank you to my school for having the study abroad
program in Hangzhou. I made some of the best memories
with my year cohort there while learning and writing
about the brain.
Thank you to my school headmaster Mr. Lynch for
encouraging me to pursue my “Discovery U” course idea
before I started writing. I felt much less hesitant to write
this book thanks to your support.
Thank you to my ex-classmate Rose for telling me that
the “Discovery U” course had already begun before I
knew it. If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have been able to
switch my courses to commit to writing this book.
 xi

Thank you to my close friend and roommate Mia for

patiently listening to my explanations on psychological
phenomena for countless times, and for supporting me
as I nervously emailed the school about my book for the
first time.
Thank you to my Hangzhou Head of House Mrs. Grace
for kindly going through the necessary arrangements so
that I could kick start the writing process.
Thank you to my project advisor Mr. Pollock for
reminding me to consider the target audience as I
created my outline and for recommending further
readings which I found insightful.
Thank you to Mr. Tam for editing parts of this book
and for being a wonderful science teacher.
Thank you to Madame Roderick for introducing Le
Petit Prince in French class. That book allowed me to see
the differences between the mind of a child and an adult.
Thank you to Mr. Tang and my classmate Max for
discussing psychological topics with me. I enjoyed the
challenge of explaining my thoughts clearly.
Thank you to Wang Lu Laoshi for helping me see the
wider scope of learning beyond the classroom
environment.
Thank you to Professor Tom Daniel from the
University of Washington in Seattle for expressing
enthusiasm for my book. I will surely consult you in the
 xii

future for further discussion now that my perspective on

neuroscience has shifted.
Thank you to Professor Cindy Moss from Johns
Hopkins University for sharing your thoughts on my book
after its online publication. I especially enjoyed talking to
you on the topic of blindness.
Of course, I am so grateful for my parents’ support and
encouragement. Mom, thank you for your reminders to
not stress about work when I was abroad. Dad, thank you
for being the public speaker of the house. Listening to
your exclusive at-the-dinner-table speeches from a
young age has truly shaped the way I think and act today.
 Introduction
Ever heard of the story of Le Petit Prince?1 One thing that
the story has taught me is the difference between adults
(or ‘les grandes personnes’, as the French author calls
them) and children (‘les enfants’). While children freely
embrace imagination, creativity in adults is often limited
by their stubborn and constant need for logical ways of
explaining things.
After encountering books on neuroscience and
psychology, I was able to find a balance between logic
and imagination. The first time I picked up and attempted
to read a non-fiction book on neuroscience, I was left
with many unanswered questions. I found myself asking
jumbles of questions when I was introduced to new
concepts. Feeling both frustrated and intrigued by these
lingering unanswered questions, I sought to learn more
about psychology and in particular, the mysteries of the
unconscious mind. Thus, it was with a little more effort
and motivation that I started thinking of the answers for
myself.
Slowly, I found the joy of thinking logically while also
using a pinch of creativity to formulate theories and ideas
to unsolved mysteries, and my appreciation for
neuroscience grew. This subject gave me a space of

1
freedom, where I could be left undisrupted in my own
world of thoughts, making ties between my own
experiences and bits of information I learned from the
books to formulate my own understanding and new
opinions. I also learned to embrace what was unknown,
asking questions rather than seeking for answers and
confirmations.
You will find that I have deliberately left some
questions unanswered in this book. Read this book and
start your expedition on this new science. Then maybe,
you too will learn to enjoy the ride and accept the
wonderful mysteries that appear along the journey.

2
 1

Neuroplasticity - The Brain’s Way

of Adapting to Change
“It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is
the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision
can be made any longer without taking into account not only
the world as it is, but the world as it will be.” - Isaac Asimov1

A Miracle Child
Lillian Grace Salerno was no ordinary baby.2 She looked
perfectly normal, and yet there was something off about
her. Her mother, Sandra, began to worry about her
daughter’s behaviour when Lillian turned 10 months of
age. “She wasn’t looking over or responding to me when
I was talking to her on her left side,” said Sandra. “I
started Googling hearing loss and polymicrogyria, and
what popped up was CMV — I had never heard of it
before.” CMV, which stands for cytomegalovirus, is a viral
infection that is common but usually unheard of. It has
the potential to create brain damage and can therefore
cause hearing loss, visual impairment, or abnormal
movements. At eight months, 90% of Lillian’s right brain

3
had already been infected and damaged by this virus.
And by the time she was 18 months old, she was taking
three medications and had up to 300 seizures every day,
affecting her even in sleep.
Doctors suggested an anatomical hemispherectomy,
the operation for removing half of a person’s brain,
which was as scary as it may seem, the last and only
decision left for Sandra and her husband who knew that
their daughter would eventually die if they did nothing.
Fortunately, Lillian was an ideal candidate for this
operation because her seizures only occurred on the
right side of her brain, which meant doctors had only to
remove the right half of the brain where the seizures
occurred which was a smooth process.
Surely enough, after leaving the hospital, Lillian
already showed massive improvement. “Post-surgery,
she’s a different child than she was before,” says Sandra.
“She’s very active, loves playing with dolls, likes to try to
do everything that her big sister does. She’s walking
now…she never was able to walk before we did brain
surgery, so her personality has really started to come
out.” That’s great, isn’t it? She’s a normal and healthy
child again, her parents are happy, and her doctors are
relieved. But hold on; how did she do it? How was Lillian
able to still function normally even with half of her brain

4
gone? Isn’t it bizarre that everything was back to normal
as if nothing had ever happened?

Rewiring the Brain

An extracted picture from Richard Hammond’s BBC Video3

Take a look at the picture above. This picture was taken

from the BBC video of an experiment carried out by
Richard Hammond that involved testing the limits of a
cuttlefish’s ability to blend in with its surrounding
environment.3 As one can see, the cuttlefish has changed
the colour of its skin using colour pigments in an attempt
to match the black and white colour of the checkered
floor. This amazing mechanism, known as camouflage,
allows organisms such as the cuttlefish to change its
appearance (based on colour in this case) thus adapting
to the environment, in order to trap prey or escape from
predators. One will find that like cuttlefish and all other

5
organisms, the human brain also has the ability to
physiologically change and adapt to the environment.
Until the 1960s, researchers believed that changes
only happened in the brain during infancy and childhood;
but by early adulthood, the brain’s structure would
remain permanent forever. In other words, whatever
was damaged in the brain after that would sadly be
incurable and unable to be compensated. If this was true,
then that would mean Lillian’s hemispherectomy would
have never worked the miracle it did. Psychologist Karl
Lashley was the first to actually show that the brain had
the ability to change its own structure and function after
studying the brain’s changes in adult rhesus monkeys. He
found that the motor cortex in these monkeys would
change their neural pathways weekly to reflect on their
own movement patterns.4 Modern researchers, inspired
by this finding, also started observing changes in human
brains, which lead to the belief that the brain was more
flexible and adaptable than people initially thought.
More research also discovered that the brain was able
to heal from damage. Like the cuttlefish, when the brain
detects a change in environment, it tries its best to adapt
to this change. It does this by forming new neural
connections which then forms new neural pathways in
the entire circuitry of the brain. Think of this as the map
of an MTR. There are different pathways on the map that

6
represent the directions that passengers can take, and if
there is an available space for a new station not on a
pathway, construction workers can then form a new
pathway on the map connecting an old station to the
new station so passengers can go there. This process of
reorganization in the brain is called neuroplasticity.5
According to neuroplasticity, frequently used areas of
the brain experience neuronal growth and form stronger
connections, and the opposite of this says neglected or
unused areas of the brain experience neural shrinkage or
lose connections. Now, researchers know that
neuroplasticity is what helps us form and maintain new
desirable habits and break the bad ones, associate new
and old concepts, and remember something for longer.6
It is also what allowed Lillian to recover from the
operation, by allowing new neural connections to form in
a specific manner within the left intact side of the brain
in order to carry out the functions of the right side of the
brain and compensate for its absence. This is all done just
by the reorganisation. However, it is important to note
that Lillian was one of the more lucky patients to have
gone through a successful hemispherectomy because her
young age meant a more rapid and complete recovery
than those who may have been much older than her.
Neuroplasticity, without most people noticing, takes
hold of the entire brain. The way our entire neural circuit

7
is structured affects the way we think, acquire skills, and
memorise things. Knowing this, our brains may look
different from one another, even though the main core
structure and anatomy of the human brain is still there.
In fact, we can see this already through people who
seem, at first glance, normal like everyone else.

The Brains of London Cabbies

Driving in London can be a daunting experience for those
who are not familiar with any of the roads, much like
walking through an unknown maze cluelessly. Compared
to New York’s grid design of the roads, London’s one
seems more akin to a plate of spaghetti. There are traffic
circles and dead-ends scattered throughout the city,
curvy roads and odd-angle turns that sometimes
intersect with each other. It is no wonder, therefore, that
those who want to become licensed London taxi drivers,
a.k.a London cabbies, need to take a series of
examinations that are collectively known as the most
difficult taxi test in the world. This test is called “The
Knowledge”. Taxi drivers in training are required to know
the 25,000 different streets of central London, and
specific information about each street. London Taxi and
Private Hire (LTPH) described the challenge in the
guidebook issued to those in training as this:7

8
To achieve the required standard to be licensed as an “All
London” taxi driver you will need a thorough knowledge,
primarily, of the area within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross.
You will need to know: all the streets; housing estates; parks
and open spaces; government offices and departments;
financial and commercial centres; diplomatic premises; town
halls; registry offices; hospitals; places of worship; sports
stadiums and leisure centres; airline offices; stations; hotels;
clubs; theatres; cinemas; museums; art galleries; schools;
colleges and universities; police stations and headquarters
buildings; civil, criminal and coroner’s courts; prisons; and
places of interest to tourists. In fact, anywhere a taxi
passenger might ask to be taken.7

That’s a lot to take in isn’t it? Well, there’s more.

During oral exams, the applicants need to know how to
get from any one destination chosen by the examiner in
London to another in the most efficient way possible.
This means that they have to know all the possible
routes, take into account the probability of traffic in one
area during a given time, and also be aware of the newest
update about any construction that may affect the
driving journey. It takes an average of four years of
studying the map of London in order to pass. To train,
most test-takers roam the streets of London on
motorbikes at all hours, taking down notes about the
position of each landmark and building on a small

9
notepad, and scrutinizing on the maps that are strapped
to the windscreen as they drive.

An extracted picture of London’s taxi driver “Knowledge” from a

video of New York Time article by Jody Rosen7

Luckily, there is a special structure in the brain that

enables these aspiring taxi drivers to memorise the
whole of London. This structure is called the
hippocampus, which is crucial for processing our long-
term memory, where information is stored for a long
period of time. It also processes the information for
spatial navigation. Wondering whether the demanding
expectations of The Knowledge had changed the growth
of the hippocampus in those who have passed it,
neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire of University College

10
London (UCL) decided to research the brains of licensed
London taxi drivers. And the results were astounding.8
In her earliest studies, Maguire discovered that when
scanning for their brain images, there appeared to be
more gray matter in the posterior hippocampus of
London taxi drivers than non-taxi drivers who were of
similar age, education, and intelligence. This led to the
conclusion that the hippocampus had adapted to the
heavy cognitive demand of navigating through London by
expanding itself. However, this could just be another
swimmer’s body illusion. Perhaps, the reason why the
London taxi drivers were able to pass the test and get
their license was that they originally already had a larger
hippocampus, putting them ahead of others who had an
average-sized hippocampus. To test which of these two
conclusions was true, Maguire and her UCL colleague
Katherine Woollett followed a group of 79 applicants for
four years and measured the growth of their hippocampi
using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) while they
completed the test. She also measured the hippocampi
of 31 normal individuals who did not drive taxis, but who
were of similar age, education, and intelligence as the
trainees. To ensure the study would be as fair as possible,
Maguire made sure that both the control group (the non-
taxi trainees) and the experimental group (the taxi
trainees) performed similarly on tests of working

11
memory and long-term memory at the start. All
participants of this study had more or fewer hippocampi
that were of the same size.
Fast forward four years later, 39 of the 79 trainees
became licensed London cabbies. Of the 40 who failed or
gave up midway, 20 decided to continue participating in
the study. Maguire found that the trainees who passed
did significantly better on the same memory tests done
at the start than those who failed, even though both
groups had similar results in the past. And about the
brain images? As expected, the MRI scan showed that the
posterior hippocampi of those who succeeded were
larger in size than those who had failed. The increase in
size could have been because of a growth of new neurons
in the hippocampal region, or it could have also been
because the neurons of the hippocampus had formed
new stronger connections in order to memorise the
streets of London. Another reason could also be due to a
growth of glial cells which support and nourish neurons,
in order to help them accommodate the intensive
training imposed upon that region. The posterior
hippocampus among the trainees who failed or stopped
and the control group did not differ in size than from the
start. But that’s not all. Although the posterior
hippocampus of taxi drivers did increase in size, the
anterior end became smaller than average. Maguire

12
thinks that the enlargement of the posterior end may
have affected the shrinkage of the anterior end over the
course of four years, meaning there was a trade in
cognitive talents between the two regions. This study,
later on published in 2011, was one of the most dramatic
pieces of evidence that contradicted the belief that our
brains are permanently wired by adulthood.8

Does Innate Talent Exist?

It is very easy to keep track of and record physical
changes in the body. Bodybuilders can use a measuring
tape to measure the size of their muscles, marathon
runners and swimmers can use a heart rate monitor to
track progress on their endurance, and those who want
to track visible improvements of the body can just use a
mirror. However, it is not always as easy and as obvious
to see the changes happening to us mentally. It would
require the change happening mentally to be strong
enough to be able to observe outside externally, in order
to convince ourselves that something is actually taking
place. Or, it would take a scan of the brain to see any
changes happening to it inside. But of course, this is not
always the most efficient way to track progress. This is
one of the reasons why people sometimes believe that
they cannot change the way they are skillfully and in
learning because they have never really been aware of

13
changes that are actually taking place inside their heads,
even when it may not be as obvious at first. But now, we
have seen from Maguire’s study what happens when the
brain is challenged and put into intensive training. We
too can be like these London taxi drivers and put in the
effort and time to make our brains exercise and push past
their limits, in order to change ourselves for the better.
Of course, this can be done best by effective training that
addresses a skill that wants to be acquired, and by being
willing to step out of one’s comfort zone to take on the
challenge.
London taxi drivers are not the only group of people
who have been researched for the effects of this
deliberate practice on their brains. In one study,
professional and amateur musicians showed an increase
of grey matter of the auditory cortex, a growth that was
likely the result of the concentration put into hearing
details of musical notes in order to detect any errors in a
musical piece.9 In another study, artists’ brain images too
showed an increase of grey matter in the parietal lobe, in
a specific portion called the precuneus, that was thought
to play a central role in visuospatial imagery.10 These
studies are building evidence to support the idea that
talent is not innate and is not something that only certain
people can achieve. Talent requires practice,
perseverance, and time in order to be honed and

14
developed to create one’s potential. Albert Einstein
wasn’t born a genius; it was his passion and curiosity that
led him to become a world-famous physicist and
mathematician. Mozart wasn’t born a music prodigy
either; it was the early childhood musical education he
received and his father’s influence that created the ideal
environment for him to achieve his musical talent by the
early age of five. So what does all this say about normal
people like us? We have the ability to change who we are
into what we want to be. Instead of hoping to reach one’s
full potential, one should create one’s own potential.

Keeping the Balance

Human evolution has resulted in great changes to how
we think. The brain’s ability to adapt to new
environments throughout humanity was one of the
important factors that helped us to eventually develop
language, complex reasoning, critical solving skills, and
introspection. Even now, humans are changing in the
digital age, both from the technological advancements
and possibly climate change (as suggested by other
researchers who thought that ancient climate change
had a similar impact on humans to the evolutionary
adaptations of other organisms11), therefore our brains
would also need to adapt to the future environment and
conditions that are different from now. Why does it need

15
to do this? Because our cells like to regulate themselves
and maintain stability from within. There is a system
called the autonomic nervous system, that regulates all
our involuntary bodily functions, such as our heart rate,
digestion, temperature, and release of hormones.
Finding and maintaining an environment inside of us that
is well-balanced and consistent with our external
environment ensures our survival in an ever-changing
world. This maintenance of the stability of processes
happening within us is called homeostasis. But when
someone tries to push past the “safe” boundaries of their
own homeostasis, the equilibrium is broken, and the
body is then forced to work to regain balance. Despite
the body’s attempt to compensate for the sudden
change, this could backfire when the body has grown so
accustomed to the action of compensating that changes
happen in the body to keep that new habit. This is
essentially how we all establish a new comfort zone and
push past our original limits. This is also mainly the
reason why it is sometimes so hard for us to improve in
skill, whether it be mental or physical. When our body
tells us that our physiological processes are imbalanced,
we have the need to go back to our original and stable
state. It is normal in human nature to not want things to
be different. After all, as we do change, we must feel a
change. This is not only true physically, but mentally too

16
---- we have already explored the minds of the taxi
drivers to know this. Remember, a caterpillar with wings
is not a butterfly. With a better understanding of what it
takes to change and what happens in our brains when we
put in frequent effort to change, we can be more
confident and determined to take on new challenges.

17
 2

Habits
“Seemingly minor yet persistent things penetrate the mind
over time making it difficult to ever realize the impact; hence,
though quite unfortunate, the most dangerous forms of
corruption are those that are subtle and below the radar.” -
Criss Jami (Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile)1

“The Living Dead”

Sleepwalkers are the closest resemblance in humans to
real-life zombies. Like the “living dead”, they are
completely unaware of all their actions while deep in
sleep, and yet they are still able to perform quite complex
behaviours. Former army soldier Peter Langdon shared
one story with the Guardian, in which his sleepwalking
habits even caused panic among fellow roommates:2

I’ve fallen out of bed on lots of occasions, including once in a

flat where the bed was eight feet above the floor. I constantly
dream about tsunamis. I just live with it without taking any
medication. Everyone who knows me seems to accept it.
However, the incident in the army (when I was chasing the

18
non-existent thief) did cause one of my roommates to sleep
with a knife under his pillow as he was convinced I would kill
him in my sleep.2

But unlike zombies, sleepwalkers like Peter Langdon

are able to regain consciousness, by either being
disrupted by an external stimulus like their roommate
who taps on them to wake up, or by naturally coming out
of the sleeping stages. But is sleep the only time that
people are able to act without fully taking over control of
what they are doing? It seems not. Just as an aircraft’s
autopilot system can take over the lives of passengers,
giving the pilot a much-needed break, humans come with
a built-in “autopilot” system that operates while we’re
awake, essentially letting our unconscious system take
over an activity while our consciousness moves to focus
on something else. While zombies can only be in their
unconscious state, we can be both conscious and
unconscious at the same time, multitasking through
various activities throughout the day. This should allow
those who fear a zombie apocalypse to rest a bit easier!

Multi-tasking with Two Systems

My father had the usual routine of sending my brother
and me to school every morning by car. He would take
the same route every weekday, and we would arrive at

19
school after 15 minutes of leaving home. This car ride
was an old part of all our morning routines, so we grew
accustomed to seeing the same buildings, trees, streets,
and roads every time my father took that route to school.
During these car rides, my father would distract himself
by talking to us about something interesting he did at
work the previous day, or something that he found
interesting in the news. On a particular Sunday, my family
had planned to go to eat an early breakfast in Central
before going to watch a movie at the cinema nearby, and
so my dad drove his car again. While deep in our
conversation about one interesting news article he saw
that morning, he didn’t notice that he had taken another
turn and was driving away from the route that we were
meant to take instead of heading towards my school,
even though he had his eyes kept on the road the whole
time. I ended the conversation abruptly and asked him
where we were going, and only then did he realise that
he had taken the wrong turn.
You may often hear people use the word “multitask”
when they have to handle more than one thing at once.
While it's true that multitasking can occur among
habitual activities that don't require much thought, it is
not possible to multitask between activities that both
require large amounts of concentration. The brain can
switch rapidly between such activities, but this only

20
creates the illusion that they're being done at the same
time. In reality, true multitasking occurs when the
subconscious mind performs a task that has been
rehearsed many times, while the conscious mind does
something of higher complexity that requires deeper
concentration. That’s why you may find it easy to solve a
math problem while walking, but you may find it much
more difficult to do the same while talking to a friend on
the phone.
The downside is, most of the time we would have no
control over when this multitasking happens because our
unconscious system only performs another task when it
thinks there are gaps in our behaviour to be filled at that
moment. And if we do in the end notice that another
activity is happening, it would most likely stop, because
now our attention is focused upon the fact that we are
now aware that another activity was taking place while
we were putting all our concentration on something else,
and hence the unconscious system, the more random,
automated and creative system leaves to let the
conscious system, the more careful, analytical but slower
system take over.
The conscious system is only a fraction of our full
experiences. Beyond our awareness is a vast system that
processes everything that we are not aware of, including
things that we cannot claim to remember or claim to

21
have experienced with high confidence (because after
all, we were not focused on these things in the first
place). The unconscious system is the important piece of
the puzzle that, together with our conscious knowledge,
forms the complexity of our behaviour and therefore
may be the unknown source for explanations as to some
of our most irrational or confusing behaviour and why we
act a certain way even when we do not have a pinpoint
reason to do so.
The unconscious system may sometimes
unintentionally go against the judgments of the
conscious system. The unconscious system has access to
different knowledge about ourselves, and likewise, the
conscious system sometimes knows more about other
things that the unconscious system doesn’t (for example,
the unconscious system wouldn’t know about the harms
of obesity and therefore would still encourage us to
snack away).
But, it still holds the intention to create a full narrative
about our experiences and to help make sense of what
we do every day based on one individual’s criteria of
what “makes sense” to them. At the same time, it also
tries to make our lives more efficient by observing and
assessing what we’re doing in a given moment and using
what it knows about our behavioral patterns to trigger
familiar reactions to the situation. For example, if one is

22
used to crossing their legs while eating at the dinner
table, this action might be undertaken by the
unconscious mind while one is completely distracted by
other thoughts.

We Are Not In Control of Ourselves

I remember my English teacher from last year once told
the class something that went like this: “Most of us
believe that we have full control over what we are doing
and we are completely aware of every action and
thought that comes from ourselves. But this is not always
true. Sometimes, we are not in control of ourselves.”
Now I realise what he meant. The unconscious system
can be very random at times with its own fast decision-
making to fill in the gaps of our behaviour in our daily
lives to help us handle it more efficiently. Because of this
unpredictability, we have the capacity to do some
embarrassing things whenever our unconsciousness
takes over and makes a decision based on previous
scenarios.
To get a taste of what these embarrassing things are
like, here were some of the top stories shared by
community members of the submission platform and
Lithuanian website “Bored Panda” in response to the
question: “What’s the Dumbest Thing You’ve Done
Because Your Brain Was On Autopilot?”:3

23
Story #1
“I was driving a rental car and noticed the gas was low. I
was at a stoplight so I rolled down the window and stuck
my head out to see if I could see the gas tank on the
driver's side. While I was looking, I felt a raindrop land on
my head. Without thinking, I reached down and hit the
button to roll up the window. Suddenly I panicked as my
head was getting slowly smashed by the rising window
and I had no idea what was happening. I panicked and
escaped and slowly figured out what I had just done.
I looked up to see that a girl in the car next to me was
looking at me incredulously. She had no context for why
I had stuck my head out of the car and, for some reason,
decided to smash it with the power window.” -
Anonymous

Story #2
“[I] went downstairs, got in the car, got halfway to work,
realised I'd forgotten my lunch, turned around and went
home. Got home to find no lunch. So I made some and
set back off to work. Got halfway and realised I don't
work [on] Sundays.” - Mixedupste

Story #3
“I used to work in a cinema and I had a habit of saying
"Enjoy your film!" after handing people the tickets they

24
got. So, of course, that also became the phrase I would
say to just random cashiers at shops after they handed
me a receipt for my groceries. I guess that's the main
reason why I started using self-checkouts more often.” -
Agne
What do these people all have in common? The
embarrassing behaviours that they displayed were all
due to their unconscious system’s instructions based on
habits. All of them were likely distracted by other
thoughts at the time, so their unconscious system took
over giving directions about these habitual actions,
resulting in unfavorable outcomes.
Our unconscious system is largely responsible for our
habits, which make up a big part of our daily lives. In fact,
40% of our daily lives are taken up by our automated
behaviours, which is a key characteristic of habits.
Unfortunately, there is only so much that the
unconscious can control before the monitoring becomes
conscious to us. The unconscious system can easily
monitor a simple task like tapping fingers on a table, but
it probably can’t direct high-level thinking tasks such as
solving 18 times 56. (go ahead, try it). Scientists call these
high-level thinking tasks “executive functions”,4 a set of
mental skills needed for the highest level of
performance. This set includes skills such as paying
attention, planning, managing time, remembering

25
details, self-inhibiting (such as preventing oneself from
indulging in a cake) and solving problems. These more
difficult tasks are thought to be handled and dealt with
primarily in the prefrontal regions of the frontal lobe.5
Because of its level of difficulty and complexity, more
attention and awareness is needed, requiring one to be
on alert and fully conscious of these types of activities.
This allows one to then carry out the task with full control
and intent. To see how the behaviour of the conscious
mind is unique, let’s next look at the unconscious-self.

Eating Without Thinking

Overeating is one of the biggest problems that many
people face every day. There are many triggers that could
give us the “slip” and let our greediness take over our
senses.6 Now, eating is more than just a way to provide
us with the energy and nutrition needed for our survival.
It has become a way to ease stress, boredom, anxiety and
also a way to provide a sense of happiness and pleasure
in our lives. When taken too far, overeating could
eventually lead from having heart burns to being obese
in the long term. Obesity has tripled worldwide from
1975 to 2016, and it has become a common problem
especially in North America.7 When we overeat, the body
releases dopamine, a pleasure hormone that plays a key
role in the motivational part of reward-motivated

26
behaviour. Just like how a dog is motivated by the reward
of a dog biscuit to obey its master’s commands, we are
encouraged by our dopamine hormone to eat even more
so as to receive that pleasant and relieving sensation
from food. And once we are compelled to eat more
frequently, the body shifts its state to suit this new
behaviour of overeating, to the point that we may not
even care or notice much discomfort caused by indulging
too much food. So how easy is it for someone to start the
journey to overeating? Research shows that all it takes is
a trip to the cinema.
Two researchers from the University of Southern
California by the name of David Neal and Wendy Wood
wanted to find out how people who had the habit of
eating popcorn during movies would react when they
were given a bag of stale popcorn to eat while enjoying
theirs at the movie theatre.8 Neal and Wood recruited
several hundred participants, consisting of some who
didn’t care too much of whether they had popcorn or
not, some who were into the habit of eating popcorn
while watching movies, and some who just wanted
popcorn. Half of the participants were given bags of fresh
popcorn while the rest were given bags of popcorn that
were left alone for 7 days untouched (but still edible).
After, the bags were collected and weighed.
Unsurprisingly to the psychologists, those who did not

27
care so much as to whether they received popcorn or not
left the stale popcorn almost completely untouched. The
participants who had the habit of eating popcorn,
however, ate just as much of the stale popcorn as those
who ate the fresh popcorn, nearly leaving no traces of
whole popcorn left. Even when the experiment was done
again in a meeting room without the cinematic effects of
the movie theatre, the results were the same.
Our explicit memories consist of the facts,
information, details and autobiographical events of our
knowledge; they are stored and retrieved from
interconnected brain regions, but most importantly from
the hippocampus, neocortex, and the amygdala. These
areas are involved in executive functioning, and as
mentioned previously, intentionally remembering details
from past experiences that we know of is part of the set
of complex mental skills. But when we eat while
distracted by other thoughts, our unconscious system is
unable to remember the fact that eating too much as a
habit can eventually lead to obesity, and that there are
many diseases and risks associated with overeating.
The unconscious system is unable to remember this
because the act of remembering this category of
information is considered a hefty job specialised only for
the conscious system to control. So instead the
unconscious system relies on procedural memories to

28
carry out tasks which we may not pay much attention to.
But what makes this memory different? Procedural
memory is acquired and retrieved unconsciously without
needing us to deliberately think about every step when
performing a motor skill, which makes it special in a way
that it allows the unconscious system to perform it with
flexibility and automaticity. This is why we are able to
pick up a spoon without needing to actually think deeply
about the act of doing so, and why we are able to move
about our day without needing to make our brain tired
with several detailed and specific instructions as to how
to do things. The only weakness of procedural memory is
that it tells us how to do something, but it does not tell
exactly when to stop.
This is the reason why it is so easy for us to overeat,
why we find an empty bag of chips in our hands after
watching the TV for a while even when we do not
remember the action of eating the chips. It would have
to take the command of the conscious system to tell
ourselves to stop what we are doing and reflect on our
actions (this is called self-inhibition, also an executive
function as mentioned earlier). The mind has a very
limited capacity for focus, so it has to coordinate and
work with two parallel systems that behave in two
different ways in order to create the full experience of
living that is beyond the boundaries of our awareness.

29
"The thoughtful intentional mind is easily derailed and
people tend to fall back on habitual behaviors. Forty
percent of the time we're not thinking about what we're
doing," Wood said. "Habits allow us to focus on other
things…Willpower is a limited resource, and when it runs
out you fall back on habits."9

Practice Makes Perfect

We have seen that neuroplasticity can help us to improve
in different skills. But not only can we improve in a
certain skill, but we can also make it more long-lasting
through stronger neural connections and more
automated the next time we do it. The unconscious
system gathers evidence of significant behavioural
patterns that have been performed before and encodes
that action into a procedural memory called muscle
memory to make it easier to be automated the next time
without the mind needing to focus on it so much. That’s
why practice is so important to develop a skill. By
rehearsing a skill for a longer period of time, one’s mind
would be able to pick up on that repeated action pattern
and hence enable it to be performed automatically while
the conscious system can focus on other activities. The
unconscious system is especially helpful in situations in
which it is best not to think critically, such as when trying
to get a shot in the basketball hoop. American former

30
basketball player Ray Allen described it in an interview
about his three-pointers: "A lot of times I'm amazed
because it feels like I didn't even jump and I'm up off the
ground at a pretty high level," Allen says. "It feels like I
just flicked it. That's just from the repetition of shooting
all the time. And that's kind of what you want. You want
to not blink when you take a big shot."10 Although it takes
a very long period of time and an immense amount of
effort to reach Ray Allen’s level of talent, the repetition
of shooting a shot in the correct form can eventually
enable it to be done without thinking about it the next
time.

Nine Brains, Nine Perspectives, One Octopus

Perhaps one of the most strange and alien-like creatures
that exist on this planet is the elusive and clever octopus.
While the anatomy of it is already bizarre enough with
one octopus having 3 hearts, 9 brains, 8 limbs, the fact
that it holds a much greater mental complexity than
other invertebrates has nonetheless intrigued many
marine scientists and neuroscientists alike to study their
behaviour and their nervous system.
Many different ways of research have included setting
up an obstacle to test its intelligence and problem-
solving skills, interacting one-on-one with them in the
sea, and just observing them from a distance in their

31
natural environment. From all the studies done on them,
there has been one profound discovery: The eight limbs
each have their own brain (literally) which allows them
to be “independent” and have their own way of
thinking.11,12 Most of the neurons in an octopus are
located not in the brain from their head, but from their
arms.13 What can their arms do? Pretty much most of
what a brain can be expected to do. They can feel the
surrounding environment, smell it, taste it, and even
“see” it through the “eyes” of their light-sensitive skin.
They can also perform and coordinate basic movements
on their own accord even when chopped off, they can
help to catch dinner, aid in completing a convincing
disguise for their octopus owner, and even solve
problems by themselves without the need of the brain in
their octopus’ head.14 They have played a crucial role in
ensuring the survival of the octopus they belong to, and
have proved to be very important in helping an octopus
overcome some very challenging obstacles that require
the use of intelligence, such as escaping a jar by
unscrewing the lid from inside or getting through a
transparent maze.15
The question that arises from exploring the weird yet
amazing mechanics of the octopus is: Does an octopus
view the world in 9 different perspectives at the same
time? Different limbs experience different parts of an

32
environment depending on how they are positioned
because they each have a brain of their own, which
means they can also fully sense the individual
components of an environment that their limbs are close
to. So does an octopus process all of the sensations
received by its individual tentacles all at once? And
where does this information even go in the neural circuit
if there is more than one brain to choose from? Say that
an individual arm’s receptors received a sensory signal
from its external environment, and that signal is alerted
to the brain that controls that arm. Does that mean that
the other brains in the octopus don’t receive the signal,
and therefore only that one arm will have to decide how
to respond to that signal?
The reason why these questions derived from that
one big question matter is because it helps us humans
reflect on the concept of what we know as
consciousness. If an octopus’ brains are each processing
and working on different things at the same time, then
what even is consciousness to them? It would literally not
be in control of itself (if we can really even call it as one
being), and yet at the same time, it would know exactly
what it was doing because the different brain centers are
facilitating its actions and cognitive processes carefully.
This is one of the many curious wonders that can be
questioned when studying octopus, which is why it is one

33
of the most mysterious and interesting creatures that are
highly intelligent and almost alien. What would it feel like
to be conscious of the unconscious while it is still
present? Believe it or not, this question can be and has
been answered by some very special human beings.

Is This Hand Really Mine?

The curious case of Karen Byrne’s left hand started to
concern both herself and her brain surgeon. Hanna
Rosin, a co-host in National Public Radio Inc. in the US
decided to investigate Byrne’s story in detail by paying
her a visit. Only in her late 20s, Byrne had experienced an
epilepsy that caused much distress to her daily life, until
she decided to get an operation to remove a part of her
brain. After the treatment, she felt like her speech was a
little funny, but otherwise everything seemed normal
again. However, it was only until she was up on her
hospital bed talking to her surgeon for a few minutes that
something shocking and unexpected happened. Here
was how Byrne reported it in her discussion with Rosin
through the radio:16

KAREN BYRNE: I had woken up. And I was sitting on the

hospital bed talking to my surgeon. And...

34
ROSIN: And then all of a sudden, her left hand picked
itself up and started moving towards her shirt, started
delicately undoing its pearly top button.
BYRNE: My hand was taking my clothes off.
ROSIN: Taking your clothes off?
BYRNE: Yeah. My hand was taking my shirt off
*laughter*.
ROSIN: And you didn't have any thought, like, I'd like to
take my blouse off now?
BYRNE: No, no, no, no, it just started to do it.
ROSIN: Karen, of course, was completely shocked and so
was her surgeon.
BYRNE: My surgeon was like, Karen, do you realize what's
happening? I said, yeah, something's wrong.

There is a condition called “executive dysfunction”,

which describes the impairment of high-level
performances/executive functions commonly caused by
brain damage to the frontal lobe, the primary center for
important executive functions.17
Another more extreme and also usually the scarier
version of “executive dysfunction” is the disorder known
as alien hand syndrome (AHS).18 It is a very rare
neurological disorder that describes a situation in which
a person’s limb seemingly acts autonomously without
the intentional control of its movements from the

35
patient. Sounds daunting, right? The things that a
person’s “alien hand” can do is just as eccentric as it
sounds. An 81-year-old right-handed lady who
developed left alien hand syndrome found that her left
hand would autonomously reach up to scratch the left
side of her face and stroke her left forehead. When she
first arrived at the Massachusetts General Hospital, she
reported that her “left hand tried to strangle her.”18
According to her, “someone” was hitting and choking her
neck, face, and shoulder. Throughout the following days
in the hospital, the lady continued to fear her left hand.
There have been many other reports and stories on the
mysterious behaviours of a person’s alien hand when
they are not in control of it, but many have said that it
seemed as if their hand had a separate mind of its own.
This, to them, seemed like the only logical explanation
for, after all, their hand was doing things by itself without
its owner telling it to. Byrne’s experience with her left
hand made her think this too.

BYRNE: Try to make it stop. I said, I can't. It won't stop it.

And then I started to cry. I just didn't know what to do.
ROSIN: Eventually, they wrestled her hand down, but
what was so troubling was that this didn't seem like some
strange physical spasm. The hand acted like it had intent.
Did the hand seem to have...

36
BYRNE: A different mind?
ROSIN: Yeah.
BYRNE: Yes, yes, yes, yes. It did seem to have a different
mind.16

However, there is a reason why the alien hand

behaves the way it does; and that reason is that of habit.
When the frontal lobe is damaged, there is an absence of
executive functioning in the brain to monitor movement
carefully. Therefore, the brain would have to rely more
on the habit-forming region of the brain, called the
striatum,19 to decide what actions to perform based on
its knowledge of our habits. When our unconscious
system accesses our procedural memory, it only knows
how to perform the certain motor task that our
memories have encoded and stored, but it is not given
information about when to restrain itself from
continuing. It would take the facilitating of the absent
executive functions to do that.
Through observing those who have suffered from
alien hand syndrome, we can gain a deep appreciation
for our wonderful mind. When the brain is unable to
focus on one part of our life anymore, such as directing
and guiding the motor movements of one hand closely,
the mysterious unconscious system does its best to try
and fill in that part of our life that has been abandoned

37
because it knows that our hand is used in many different
situations in our life, whether big or small. And how does
it know this? From analysing. It makes connections and
analyses our movements, picking up patterns of
movements that have occurred frequently as we carry on
our daily life. From there, it unconsciously encodes the
frequently rehearsed movement into a habit, to make it
easier for us to perform the next time since it must have
been so important for us to perform it frequently. It
understands that the absence of a small habit can have a
big effect on the way of life, so it tries its best to rewrite
a new narrative for our life by making its own decisions
as to when to perform a habit. In other words, it tries to
help us make sense of our world, make sense of
ourselves, our uniqueness, and the meaning behind what
we do every day.
As Karen Byrne paid more attention to the behaviour
of her alien hand, she picked up on a distinct pattern and
came to the conclusion that it “wanted to make her more
moral”. “It’s trying to make me a better person,” she
said.20 In her theory, her alien hand had noticed the
habits from her own culture and had rooted its actions
there, which was the reason why it would seem to
oppose her intended actions if it seemed to go against
her cultural norms. “When I go to light a cigarette, the
hand will either put the cigarette out or flick the ashes

38
around,” she explained. “Oh, it’s such a pain in the rear
end, it is. I understand that [it] wants me to quit but cut
the crap.” Even when our unconscious system’s plan
backfires sometimes such as in the embarrassing stories
above, it does not mean it is purposely trying to
contradict the conscious system in every way possible. It
is merely just conflicting without the direct intention to
really do so. But is there a time when both our conscious
and unconscious can work harmoniously? Evidence says
there is.

39
 3

Imagination Can Go A Long Way

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what
you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create
what you will.” - George Bernard Shaw1

Being Present in the Game

The Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney
had a very strange habit.2 Before the day of a Premier
League football match, he would prepare himself by
going through a routine that entailed one queer aspect:
lying in bed and visualising the ideal match. He must be
quite the dreamer. He revealed that he used to visualise
the game matches so that he had a “memory” before the
game. To him, this was a completely normal habit that he
had adopted a long time ago and made into a routine the
day before every match. But why does this matter? It
may seem at first to be merely a solution to boost
positivity and self-confidence before a match, but there
is actually a bigger reason to practice visualisation:
scientific research has shown that visualising yourself
doing a certain action literally fires the neurons in the

40
part of the body that would perform that exact action in
reality. In plain English, imagination not only helps to
visualise a movement but also helps your body to
simulate the movement. It is for this reason that many
other athletes including former rugby union player Jonny
Wilkinson, professional tennis player Andy Murray,
retired competitive swimmer Michael Phelps, and
professional golfer Tiger Woods used visualisation to
help prepare them mentally and physically for
competition.3

Training Your Imagination

After studying motor imagery and visual targets in
participants, neurologist Jeannerod hypothesized that
there were certain areas in the brain that were activated
during both physical and imaginary movements. He
called this “functional equivalence”, and he believed that
imagining movements could enhance the state of the
same physical movement when performed the next
time.4 Inspired by the works of Jeannerod, the “PETTLEP
model of imagery” was created in 2001, and it is used
specifically in sports training for athletes who want to
enhance their physical performance through imagination
in the present day.5 The acronym PETTLEP stands for the
seven components that can be used to create a more

41
vivid and detailed imagination to improve physical
performances:
Physical - Imagining physical characteristics on the day
of a sports match. Rooney would habitually ask the kit
man what shirts, shorts, and socks he and the team
would be wearing on the day of the match and what
colour they would be, in order to visualise himself
wearing it and make the imagery more accurate and
realistic to the actual match. Physical characteristics also
include how the movement is actually performed. For
example, Rooney may consider how his foot would move
in order to target and get that perfect aim into the goal.
Environment - This is the imagination of the setting.
For Rooney, this would be the football pitch. When he
visualises shooting a goal, he doesn’t just think about the
act of shooting the goal itself, he also takes into account
where he would shoot, where he would be standing, the
crowd’s cheers, and how the grass would smell on the
football pitch.
Task - Details that are correlated to the task that will
be performed. Wilkinson uses this component during his
visualisation sessions: “I visualise the ball traveling along
that path and imagine the sensation of how the ball is
going to feel when it hits my foot for the perfect strike.”
Timing - Realistically imagining how long it would take
to make the movement in real life. Sometimes, athletes

42
choose to also use “slow-motion” to analyze and focus
on all the complicated little details that make up a more
difficult movement. This is just like slowing down the
speed of a video to observe closely what things are
happening in one short moment.
Learning - Assimilating and adjusting the image as one
improves to reflect on and review the performance
progress.
Emotion - How does it feel to be in the moment? One
may feel butterflies in their stomach or feeling a rush of
adrenaline when a goal is closed to being stricken.
Perspective - The perspective can be either in the first
person or the third person, but most athletes choose to
use the first person to feel a more intimate connection
with the image, making it more realistic and more
simulated as if they were really experiencing it at that
moment. But the third person could be beneficial if the
focus is on the form and positioning.

Multiple studies have investigated the applications of

PETTLEP-based training in the enhancement of athletic
performances.6 In one study, 40 junior gymnasts
attempted to do a turning jump on a beam. They were all
arranged into four groups: a physical training group, a
PETTLEP-based training group, a group using stimulus
only imagery (such as reinforcing the imagination of sight

43
of the beam), and a control group. All groups had to
perform their task 3 times per week. After a six week
intervention, both the physical training and PETTLEP-
based training groups had improved significantly from
their pretest performance, but the stimulus and control
groups did not improve so significantly. When comparing
the results of the physical training group with the
PETTLEP-based training group, there was no significant
difference either. So is imagining just as good as actually
doing the movement? From the studies done by
researchers, this may be so. However, it would take a
well-rounded and very vivid imagination to really boost
the performance of a person in order to be effective
enough for usual training. And by combining or
alternating between both types of training, the body is
able to really work itself in the mental and physical
aspect, which provides a good layout for progression.
Visualization and action, without us knowing, may be
more interconnected than we may initially think. Srini
Pillay, author of “Life Unlocked: 7 Revolutionary Lessons
to Overcome Fear” says: “Visualization and action are
intimately connected, involving the motor cortex.
Thinking about our body doing something—raising an
arm or walking forward—activates the motor cortex
directly.”7 But it takes a strong signal for a person to
actually turn their imaginary movement into physical

44
action. There is a certain threshold of signaling that must
be passed in order to do so. Perhaps, this is the reason
why we sometimes feel the urge to do an action when
we think intently about it.

Imagining the Way to Recovery

Getting a stroke is scary. It occurs in a matter of seconds,
and after that one’s life could be altered permanently. It
happens when part of the brain suddenly loses its blood
supply, which leads to rapid damage and even death of
the cells that are controlled by neurons that are not
receiving the adequate blood supply. Many stroke
victims go through physical rehabilitation, in hopes of
restoring and enhancing their functional abilities; but this
may not be effective for those who are severely affected
by stroke, since their neurons may be extremely weak. In
the search for alternative solutions, doctors came across
the concept of motor imagery: imagining the movements
used for performing a task.8
Just by imagining a movement, the neurons of the
motor cortex are fired, but not necessarily strong enough
to actually perform the action. Through this logic, the
brain can adjust and form stronger connections slowly
with the neurons that are fired when imagining a
movement, allowing a slow but steady and more
effective recovery. A research team from China and the

45
US set out to review over 75 studies that used this
technique for rehabilitation and came across promising
results. In one of the reviewed studies dating in 2011, 29
stroke patients who suffered from long-term one-sided
muscle weakness were tested for its effectiveness. They
all took part in 30-minute physical therapy sessions
focusing on improving the function of their affected
shoulder and arm for 3 days per week for 10 weeks.
After, one group of patients had to listen to either a 20,
40 or 60 minute-long pre-recorded audio of motor
imagery, while another group listened to audio
recordings that did not use motor imagery. After 10
weeks, the researchers found that the group who
listened to the audios of motor imagery experienced less
arm impairment than those who listened to the other
audios. Even more, those who listened to the hour-long
motor imagery recording received the most benefit out
of the 10 weeks. This suggests that longer recordings
resulted in better outcomes. Other studies reached
similar conclusions that motor imagery was indeed
beneficial and useful. There are limitations to when
motor imagery should be used. If the neurons that signal
a patient’s affected part were completely dead, it
wouldn’t respond to any firing signals from the motor
cortex. Other factors such as age and passage of time
since the stroke incident also determine how effective it

46
would be for some patients. It still holds, however, a very
strong position to assist in the recovery of different
stroke patients suffering from a mild or severe level given
the findings from the multiple collective studies.8,9
The demonstrations of how mental simulation can
support physical activity show the teamwork of the
conscious and unconscious system in helping us perform
our actions better. With the intentional visualisation of a
movement by our consciousness, we are able to fire the
neurons of the motor cortex where the unconscious has
access to, helping our unconscious system perform
motor tasks better through the indirect guidance of our
awareness.

I Have the Power to Control You

As a student, I found Ted Talks to be one of my main
sources of educational inspiration. As I scrolled through
Ted Talks on my computer screen, I came across one that
caught my attention which read: “How to control
someone else’s arm with your brain”.10 Greg Gage, a
neuroscientist who was previously an electrical engineer
making touch screens for a living, was passionate about
inventing gadgets that kids could use to learn about the
brain. He explained: "Scientific equipment, in general, is
pretty expensive, but it's silly because before [getting my
PhD in neuroscience] I was an electrical engineer, and

47
you could see that you could make it yourself. So we
started as a way to have fun, to show off to our
colleagues, but we were also going into classrooms
around that time and we thought, wouldn't it be cool if
you could bring these gadgets with us so the stuff we
were doing in advanced PhD. programs in neuroscience,
you could also do in fifth grade?"
In this Ted Talk, he invited two audience members up
on stage to demonstrate the uses of some of his DIY
neuroscience equipment. One volunteer, Sam, was asked
to put electrodes on her arm that were connected to an
iPad which allowed Gage to observe the electrical activity
happening in her motor cortex through an app. Then
another volunteer, Miguel, went onto the stage as the
victim of a more fascinating demonstration: getting Sam
to control his arm’s actions. After taping electrodes onto
the part of his skin where the ulnar nerve was located
right underneath, Gage then proceeded to hook up
Miguel’s wires that were clipped onto the electrodes
with a human-to-human interface, so that both of Miguel
and Sam’s wires were plugged which allowed the
electrical signals transmitted from Sam’s neurons to flow
into Miguel’s ulnar nerve. Sure enough, after one or two
attempts, Sam was able to make three of Miguel’s fingers
flick upwards by squeezing her fist and pulling her hand
inwards while Miguel stayed relaxed and composed. But

48
what happened when Gage moved Sam’s hand? No
reaction. Nothing happened on Miguel’s end. When Sam
squeezed her own fist again, Miguel’s fingers jerked. By
showing this, it was clear that Sam’s brain was the one
making Miguel do things he did not have control over.
The audience was satisfied, laughter was heard, and
Gage ended his enthusiastic Ted Talk with the closing
sentence: “This is what is happening all across the world-
- electrophysiology! We’re going to bring on the neuro-
revolution.” Applauses.
And yet, there could have been more to this story.
What if Sam was told to imagine herself squeezing her
fist? Could it have produced the same result than when
she physically acted out the movement? Maybe so. But
she would have to put more of her attention onto that
task, in order for her imagination to first reach the access
of her hand’s neurons. But once that threshold for firing
a signal is conquered, it may just be a case of whether
Miguel’s ulnar nerve is relaxed enough to receive the
electrical signal. This all sounds very much like science-
fiction, or even as a new superpower. But the mind is the
master behind it all, and we can observe this through
learning about the many incredible things it does for us.
But what if electronic cables weren’t needed? What if
merely just demonstrating an action could cause a

49
person watching to follow your lead without them really
knowing why?

Ctrl C Ctrl V
Twenty-seven years ago, neuroscientist Giacomo
Rizzolatti and his graduate students at the University of
Parma in Italy made a shocking discovery that launched
a new series of research in the neuroscience
community.11 They were doing a typical neurophysiology
study with a macaque monkey, where they stuck the tip
of “needle-thin” electrodes into the individual neurons of
the macaque’s premotor cortex to see if the electrodes
would detect any firing from the neurons when the
macaque did an action. When the monkey grabbed an
object, the electrodes signaled that the premotor
neurons were firing. This was normal to Rizzolatti, as it
was known that the premotor cortex was involved in the
planning and execution of movements. Satisfied with the
results, the group went to lunch without noting to turn
off the equipment used. Now, this is where the
interesting part comes in.
One of the graduate students went into the laboratory
unsuspectingly, where the monkey still attached with
electrodes could see him with full-view. As he started
eating his ice cream cone for dessert, he noticed that the

50
electrodes of the monkey were signaling a spike in the
premotor cortex, even though the monkey wasn’t even
moving. Confused, scientists that came into the lab
started shoveling food into their mouths and found that
the monkey’s premotor neurons fired whenever they put
the food into their mouths. The scientists concluded that
the monkey’s neurons fired when it performed its own
actions, but also when it observed the actions of others
even though it may be motionless. This suggested that
the firing of the monkey’s neurons that were associated
with performing a certain movement would fire also
when that similar movement was performed by
someone else but observed by the monkey. That is to say,
the neurons of the monkey mirrored the actions it saw.
Rizzolatti called these neurons that fired in response
to observed actions “mirror neurons”: neurons that fire
in order to implement a similar observed action into its
owner. But if this applies to monkeys, then does it apply
to humans?

Acchi Muite Hoi

The game of rock-paper-scissors is by now a popular and
well-known hand game played amongst children. While
there have been some extensions to this two-player
game (such as adding the lizard and Spock options for
more difficulty), one particular extension was invented in

51
Japan that made the rock-paper-scissors game
experience suddenly more interesting.12 This extension is
known as “Acchi Muite Hoi”, which roughly translates to
“Hey, Look That Way!” in English. It can even be played
as a separate game. The basic layout of this game
involves two players who have played rock-paper-
scissors beforehand. The winner needs to point their
index finger in front of the losing player and say “acchi
muite hoi!”, then immediately choose to either move
their index finger upwards, downwards, left, or right. At
the same time, the losing player needs to nod their head
either up, down, left or right. If the losing player’s face
turns toward the same direction that the winner’s index
finger is pointing to, they lose. Vice versa, they win if the
winner’s index finger is pointing in a direction that is
different from where they turned their face to. Got that?
Now, try to play this game several times with different
people, making sure that you get a chance to be the one
nodding your head in a certain direction.
What you would most likely find is that the game is
harder than it sounds for the nodding player, because
many people have the urge to turn their head in the same
direction that the index finger is pointing to. This is an
example of a common human behaviour called
“mirroring”, which says that we are more inclined to

52
imitate or copy each other’s gestures subconsciously. Is
this merely a result of instinct?

YAWN!
One of the fun tricks that you can use whenever you want
to test if someone is paying close attention to you:
pretend to yawn, then see if the person watching you
would yawn too. Most likely, you would find that the
person would only yawn if he/she were paying attention
to you. Why does this trick work? The reciprocal
response is defined as “contagious yawning”, a universal
phenomenon caused by seeing someone yawn
beforehand. Researchers have found that a person is also
more likely to yawn when hearing or even just thinking
about yawning. If I were to put in more facts about
yawning or even just the word itself, the chances are that
you too would end up yawning by just reading what I
have typed. Within our daily interactions with people,
humans may become moodier when others around them
seem sad and may laugh more for no apparent reason
when others around them laugh.
When using functional magnetic resonance imaging
(ƒMRI) in humans, results from experiments suggested
that the firing of neuron networks for performing certain
movements were present when the similar movements

53
were observed in others. So it seems that humans also
have a mirroring system with mirror neurons.13 Now we
know that not only can we activate our neurons by
performing our own actions or imagining ourselves
moving, we can also do this through simply observing
others’ motions. Rizzolatti hypothesized that this could
explain how we understand others around us and explain
our social interactions with each other.

“I Feel You”: The Truth Behind Empathy

If you have ever come across those “try not to”
compilations on YouTube, you would probably have
come across one that challenges your ability to stay still
without wincing. While it may be easy for some to not
wince, it really depends on whether a person is able to
identify with or put themselves in the shoes of the person
experiencing something that is not very pleasant to see
in the series of videos. This is empathy.14 But with the
new discovery of mirror neurons, our ability to
empathize and understand each other has been put into
questioning. Perhaps it is not the case that we are truly
“empathetic” and are able to relate to someone without
experiencing the same emotion as that person
simultaneously. Maybe we rely on experiencing that
feeling of another person within ourselves first in order
to empathize and truly relate to someone.

54
 At the Social Brain Lab in Amsterdam, Christian
Keysers decided to carry out an experiment to
understand this. Participants of the study were asked to
watch a video of someone grasping toy balls scattered
within a large bin, and after some of them had to
determine whether the person in the video hesitated
before picking a ball (this was not shown in the full
video). Keysers used transcranial magnetic stimulation
(TMS), a non-invasive procedure that uses magnetic
fields to stimulate neurons, along with ƒMRI to interfere
with different regions of the brain that are involved with
the mirroring system. He showed that the participants’
ability to detect the level of confidence in the person of
the video was impaired, suggesting that their mirroring
system was important to help them perceive how others
felt inside.15 “Very rapidly, we got this unifying notion
that when you witness the states of others you replicate
these states in yourself as if you were in their shoes,
which is why we call these activities ‘vicarious states,’”
Keysers said. To what extent can our mirror neurons fire?
Ying-yi Hong, a fellow of the Association for
Psychological Science in the Chinese University of Hong
Kong explained that the frequency in which mirror
neurons fire in response to seeing another person doing
something may be different based on the culture a
person is associated with. “Despite all these

55
neurobiological capabilities enabling us to empathize
with others, we still see cases in which individuals chose
to harm others, for example during intergroup conflicts
or wars,” Hong said. When watching the frightened faces
of a person of their own race, people showed more
activity in their amygdala than when they saw a needle
pricking the skin of someone from another race. The
brain chooses to react based on favoritism in this case,
which is one biased limitation of human empathy. The
way our mirror neurons work shouldn’t be seen as only
to do with the neurological activity inside of us, but
instead should also be seen as to incorporate the social
aspect of our lives.
Imagine saying “I know how you feel” without really
knowing how the person feels. Has there ever been a
moment when you have truly empathized with someone
without experiencing the feeling the person is facing first
in yourself? It would be really tough or even just straight
up lying in order to say you have. It would probably be
more of sympathy than empathy. This is because it may
be true that we are all secretly selfish human beings who
only understand how others feel in a situation by
experiencing it ourselves first. Our mind puts ourselves in
front of everything else, in an attempt to preserve our
self-importance and individuality. That is why it is so
important for the brain that we are able to simulate what

56
others are feeling, so that we can make sense of things in
this world that others have made sense of already, in
order to let ourselves fit in and be part of the big picture.
So what may be the troubles of having an absence in
mirror neurons?

Recognition and Autism

I was in the “lemon” class of the Qing Ming Xing autism
center in Hangzhou, listening to one of the classes that
the children with autism were taking. On the left, there
was a girl who kept shaking her desk and yelling
uncontrollably while the teacher spoke. Slightly annoyed,
the teacher told her to be quiet, but she wouldn’t stop.
And when it came time for her to answer a question, she
was able to stand up slowly and say her answer without
much trouble but maybe just a few fragmented words. I
wondered, what could be the reason behind her
seemingly irrational behaviour a moment before if she
was able to answer a question calmly a moment after?
Did she understand that the teacher was upset before?
The theory of broken mirrors as a cause of autism is
still highly controversial today.16,17 There has not been
enough evidence to support it, but there also has not
been enough evidence to say that it is completely wrong.
Within the autism spectrum disorder, there is a wide
range of illnesses that all have a distinctive symptom of

57
difficulty with social interactions. There are so many
variations, that the illness is sometimes confused with
other types of mental illnesses outside of the autism
spectrum. One of the common characteristics of those
with autism is that they cannot recognize people or their
emotions. But what if this was because they do not have
neuronal mirrors? Following this logic, emotions are only
recognizable if the neurons have already created the
experience of that emotion in oneself, therefore one is
able to identify that emotion in someone else now that
they have experienced it.
Research in the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping
Center of Semel Institute used ƒMRI to measure the brain
activity of 10 children with autism and 10 typically
developing children. They observed 80 photos depicting
emotions including anger, fear, happiness or sadness.
The severity of symptoms for the children with autism
was tested using two different indication methods
separately. Unlike the developing children, the children
with autism had no activity while observing the pictures
in the pars opercularis of their inferior frontal gyrus, a
part known to be involved in the mirror neuron system.17
They also showed reduced activity in the emotional
center of their brains, which implied that the absence of
the mirror neurons affected whether children with
autism were able to process emotions. Throughout this

58
experiment, the children were carefully facilitated in
order to get the most accurate result with the groups
involved. But then, some doctors have claimed that there
have been indications in which children with autism were
able to mimic things when they got the right inputs. Dr.
Antonia Hamilton is an expert on mimicry and imitation
in autism, and she strongly believes that the broken
mirrors theory is a myth. She believes that patients with
autism do not have a problem with imitation, but instead
struggle with knowing the right cue for when to imitate
and how much to imitate. This, she says, is a social skill
that people underestimate.18
While people are still trying to understand these kinds
of mental disorders, what we know now is based on the
evidence gathered by researchers and scientists over the
years. And from this pool of evidence, we can be sure for
now that physically executing movements, imagining
movements, and even just observing them in others can
help us improve our overall physical performance over
time with the right practice. One crucial thing to note is
that in all three methods, the neurons are triggered to
fire unconsciously by itself. It is only the thinking, the
planning and the part of being aware of a movement that
is conscious in the process. By treating the conscious
system like an “instruction manual” to guide mental
simulation, a bridge is formed that links the conscious to

59
the unconscious system, so that they are able to
coordinate and work in harmony to help improve our
motor skills.
But what about when we dream? During that period,
the prefrontal cortex is rarely active, meaning there
should be no consciousness involved while dreaming.
And yet, we are still able to “picture” or “imagine” our
dreams in our heads even without an “instructor” telling
us to do so. If dreams were equivalent to imaginations,
then could sleepwalking be just a result of our
unconscious processes stimulating our neurons to
perform the actions in our dreams when our muscles
haven’t been paralyzed yet during the stages of sleep?
More importantly, where on earth would our dreams or
vision even come from without the conscious mind’s
involvement for imagination?

60
 4

How We Perceive The World

“I dream my painting and I paint my dream.” ― Vincent
Willem van Gogh1

More Than Meets the Eye

“My Wife and My Mother-In-Law”,

by the cartoonist W. E. Hill, 19152

61
What is the first thing you see when you look at this
image? The responses in the past years that have been
directed towards this famous optical illusion reflect how
we perceive things differently from each other.2 Perhaps
you would have seen a young woman’s face turned away
from view, or an old lady with a crooked nose. Or maybe,
you would have noticed a parrot’s head or a beaver
climbing a pile of sticks instead. It would take one or two
more careful looks at this image to notice something
else. No matter what you saw first, it is your initial
perception and your brain’s initial way of understanding
this image.
When we see things around us, signals are
communicated from neuron to neuron in the part of our
brain that processes visual information received by our
eye receptors. Then like analysing a piece of literature,
the unconscious system of our mind looks at and
organizes every bit of visual information, then tries to
make sense of it through interpretations. This is like
piecing a puzzle together. The little individual puzzle
pieces represent the information that our eyes have
detected, and the resulting image of the full puzzle when
put together correctly is our perception. But in order to
get from many individual pieces to one whole meaningful
and comprehensible picture, the brain needs to do the

62
work of organising and connecting the fragments
together by using its own logic to see where the pieces
should go based on what it knows. This is to say, that
everything we see is not a perfect “copy and paste” of
what our eyes have processed; after all, they merely just
provide us with a visual sensation. Our real vision, or
perception, is the result of also incorporating our
knowledge and experiences, which have a major
influence on how we make sense of certain images such
as the image of the young woman or the old lady above.
We see the world with not just our eyes; we see the
world with our brain too.

Two Thinking Systems

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it
deosn’t mttaer in what oredr the ltteers in a word are,
the olny iprmoetnt tihng is that the frist and lsat ltteer be
at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you
can stlil raed it wouthit a porbelm. This is bcuseae the
huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the
word as a wlohe.3 If you were able to understand all of
that, then you have just experienced a fraction of what
organizing and interpreting information is like for the
unconscious system. The unconscious system is quick
and automatic, making it a handy tool to have beside
oneself whenever needed (by the end of this book, we

63
would have learned it is much more than just a “tool”).
Daniel Kahneman, the famous author of the best-selling
book “Thinking Fast and Slow”,4 described two systems
in our mind referred to as “system 1” and “system 2” that
we can use to fit the basic description of the conscious
and unconscious system:5

“System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with

little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control”
“System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental
activities that demand it, including complex
computations. The operations of System 2 are often
associated with the subjective experience of agency,
choice, and concentration.”

System 1 is much like the unconscious system, while

system 2 is similar to our conscious system. There isn’t
really a better system, as we have seen that both are
equally important in facilitating our lives. But, we have
also seen that both operate in different ways that lead to
different outcomes in certain situations. Ultimately, it is
up to the brain to decide which to use when given the
options. For example, it would be much faster if the
unconscious system was used to answer what 2×2 is
automatically instead of carefully breaking down every
single step entailed to solve it as this takes up a lot more

64
time and energy. But if finding the answer to a riddle or
mind trick, more caution is required from the conscious
system’s high-level thinking and analysing to refrain
oneself from immediately making assumptions and
making mistakes. Here are some examples of such
problems:
1. How many of each animal did Moses bring on the
ark?
2. Mary’s father had five daughters: Nana, Nene,
Nini, Nono. What is the fifth called?
3. Some months have 31 days, some others have 30
days. How many months have 28 days?
4. How can a man not sleep for 15 days straight?
5. You that read wrong.

Unless you have come across similar questions before

or you are just a very careful and logical person, it is fairly
easy for someone to be tricked by these brain teasers
that may seem simple at first glance (and they are, yet
they still puzzle us). When we learn something that
becomes a mental framework of our reality or something
universal to us (such as learning that there is a continent
called “Asia”), it is the unconscious system’s job to make
a mental note of that so it can use this acquired new
knowledge to help us think faster the next time. So when
asked about the name of the fifth daughter in the second

65
problem, for example, the unconscious system would
have automatically picked up the pattern of vowels in the
names of the other four daughters and recalled the old
knowledge that the vowel following “o” would logically
have to be “u”. If a normal person who only had the
chance to read the question once had to answer this
riddle, then the person’s answer would likely be “Nunu”
to fit the logic of the unconscious system. It makes sense,
after all. But if this person had paid close attention to the
sentence, the conscious system would have been alert
enough to realise through careful analysis that the
answer was in the question, urging the person to answer
“Mary” instead.
We can see ourselves as a balance between two sides
based on this: one is the fast, automatic but sometimes
careless side while the other is the more attentive,
cautious but slow side. While the unconscious system
would thrive well for managing tasks in a familiar
environment where routines have been recognized and
well-established, the conscious system, on the other
hand, would suit better in unfamiliar and new
environments where it can process and take in things
more slowly but with more precision and awareness. The
interactions between our conscious and unconscious
system with the external world are what allows us to
acquire knowledge, construct knowledge, use

66
knowledge, and form perceptions. This is key to our
survival and exploration of the world. Thus far, there has
been only one known place where we would have to
explore another world of our own creations alone, armed
with only our imagination and thinking: our dreams. In
this realm, it is questionable whether the environment is
one of familiarity or one of unknown background. So how
does our mind behave? What are our perceptions like?
What are the limits of this fantasy world in comparison
to reality?

Losing Our Minds

We now enter the Life of Sleep. There are two categories
of sleep: Rapid eye movement sleep (REM) and non-rapid
eye movement sleep (NREM).6 The stages of sleep can be
split into five, with the four former stages fitting in the
category of NREM sleep and the latter being in the REM
category. Contrary to belief, the brain is very much active
during the sleep cycle; but some areas are active only in
certain stages and inactive in others.
The arguably most interesting stage of sleep for
speculation is REM sleep, the stage that involves the
rapid movement of the eyes while closed (as its name
suggests). Not only is this stage said to be the deepest
part of our sleep cycle, but it is also theorized to be where
our most vivid dreams occur.

67
 Collective studies have used positron emission
tomography (PET) brain scans to study brain activity
during the transitioning stages of normal sleep, and have
found different patterns of activation and deactivation
for some regions throughout the process.7 However,
there was one particular region deactivated during
NREM sleep, remaining consistently inactive throughout
REM sleep and even lagging behind other regions when
reaching the period of awakening: the dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex.8,9

Image of the location of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

in the brain8

68
Various studies have suggested that this region located
in the frontal lobe (as shown above) is involved in high
executive functions, particularly for working memory,
manipulating information and for the intervention of
routine responses when confronted with a new
environment.10 One could say that this is a region for
reflection on thoughts and actions combined with high-
level thinking so that one can make the best decisions
before responding to external stimuli through self
awareness.10,11
Along with the other deactivated cortices during REM
sleep, this region misses out on the things that will
happen and hence there is very little regulation over the
things that the mind can come up with while dreaming
and there is no self-reflection on the sanity of our dreams
while it progresses.12,13 Perhaps this is why we are able
to still “go with the flow” and cope with the interesting
narrative of our dreams, even when our dreams are
sometimes made of the most bizarre and silly things that
make absolutely zero sense. Without the facilitation,
judgment and inhibitory rules from the logical and self-
reflecting regions of the brain, our imagination becomes
a powerful and uncontrollable force. Only when the
prefrontal cortex is fully awakened at the end of the
sleep cycle does the dreamer reflect on and suddenly
become aware of all the nonsense that they have been

69
dreaming about and wonder “what the heck happened?”
We are able to clearly see, therefore, the power of
consciousness in helping us be conscious and aware of
the things around us, making sure that what we observe
is rational and logical; at least, in our opinion.
But that’s not the only lesson we can learn from sleep.
Backtracking to when the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
deactivates, it is obvious by now that there were strange
events occurring outside of the prefrontal cortex. The
question is, what occurred? And how did it lead to the
creation of dreams?

Storyteller of Dreams
Scientists discovered something odd in animal brains
during sleep.14 It started when the two French scientists,
Michel Jouvet and François Michel, performed a study
with sleeping cats in 1959. During brain recording,
mysterious waves that no one had ever seen before
suddenly appeared in the pons of the brainstem. What
was more surprising, was that the same waves were
confirmed in other mammalian species, including non-
human primates (such as macaques and baboons) and
rats. Although they have never been fully confirmed in
humans (as there are still ethical issues for invasive
recording), rare occasions have shed light on the
presence of these waves. Researchers found, through

70
recordings and observations, that these mysterious and
distinct waves were early predictors for the onset of REM
sleep, suggesting that they were important in the
activities during that stage. What is more exciting, is the
fact that REM sleep is known for the period when people
dream the most vividly. Does that mean the waves are
also involved with dreaming? If so, then that implies that
we are able to see which regions are involved with
dreams just by looking at where the waves pass on our
brain map during sleep. The course of these waves in the
brain varies from species to species, but scientists were
soon able to detect the three key regions that it passed
through: the pons, the lateral geniculate nucleus, and the
occipital cortex. This was the pathway to dreaming. It
was also because of this distinct pathway, that scientists
gave the name PGO waves (ponto-geniculo-occipital).15

Ponto-Geniculo-Occipital (PGO) Waves in Cats15

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 J. Allan Hobson, a dedicated dream researcher
suggested that random neural firings from the brainstem
during REM sleep signaled the onset of dreaming. This is
supported by the observation of passing PGO waves
through the pons, which is part of the brainstem. The
neural firings proceed on to the lateral geniculate
nucleus, a relay center in the thalamus. The thalamus
relays sensory and motor signals to the cerebral cortex,
therefore playing an especially important role to make
sure the right sensory receptors go to the right
processing centers according to their sensory type (e.g.
signals from the retina go to the visual processing
center). The lateral geniculate is known as the relay
center specifically for the visual pathway, receiving most
visual information from the retina and passing it along to
the visual cortex which processes and projects what we
see, located in the occipital lobe at the back of our brain.
However, the lateral geniculate nucleus receives
information from the brain stem and not the retina.16
So exactly what kind of signals does it pass along to
the visual cortex, if the brain stem is not the one in charge
of receiving visual information? Actually, there aren’t
really different types of neural signals that help to
differentiate the different types of sensory information
being processed. All signals are communicated with

72
different frequencies, and that is what determines the
difference between every signal. Other than that, all
other characteristics of signals are the same. That means
that the exact same signal fired by a neuron could project
the image of a hot dog in our mind if it ends up in the
pathway to the visual cortex, but on the other hand it
could also produce the sound of a ringing telephone if it
chose to go through the pathway to the auditory cortex
instead. Whatever random signals the brain stem fires is
passed on by the lateral geniculate nucleus to the
occipital lobe, to let it translate the signals into a visual
form regardless the resulting look.
Try this: look at your surroundings, and focus your
vision on one particular object. Then, imagine a pizza
slice vividly in your head, while still looking hard at your
chosen object. While it is clear that you can see the
object, you would find that the slight image of the pizza
slice appears before you too. But how can we see it if it
is non-existent? Our eyes don’t detect any signals of a
pizza slice, after all. The important concept to grasp from
this small observation is that the last step that generates
our vision is what determines what we will ultimately
see, implying that we don’t see things directly from our
eyes --- what we see is a product from the brain that used
the information from the eyes. In the process of creating
a vision, the first few components of it are passed along

73
from the eyes to the brain, where the brain is able to
tweak and modify what our eyes detect, even inserting
snippets of our own creations (like the pizza slice) into
the code of vision. Theoretically, this is similar to what
happens with memories and dreams.
With the resulting visual information translated by the
visual cortex, the brain is then left to try and make sense
of the visual information. The thing is, the rest of the
brain does not know where the visual information came
from -- all it knows is that the visual cortex received
information passed along by the thalamus through
pathways, so it assumes the original signals must have
come from the retina for it to ultimately have reached
the visual hub of the brain. Assuming that the retina has
detected something from the outside world, it tries its
best to interpret what that thing is to provide a complete
visual display of what is happening around the person.
How? Through the unconscious system. Remember, the
conscious system is deactivated in this stage of sleep,
meaning that it is up to the unconscious system to take
over. It is like the detective Conan of our minds that tries
to create a logical storyline of a mystery out of its own
genius thinking and creativity along with given clues. If
there was the image of a gun and a bank, then the dream
possibly would have involved a robbery (if the person’s
culture is used to such stereotypical associations), which

74
may have later evolved into another new storyline. Or if
there was the image of a cake and friends, then the
dream may have been about a party or just about baking.
Depending on who the person is and their personal
background, dreams vary with accordance to
experiences, culture, beliefs, norms, and memories.

Reason to Dream
The question that has always puzzled me is this: Why do
we dream? Did our ancestors always dream? Perhaps
these questions are out of the branch of science, asking
the “why” instead of the “how”. Taking a psychoanalytic
view, people have believed that there is a reason for the
logic of our unconsciousness, why the logic operates in
certain ways to create the dreams we experience every
night. They believe messages are being communicated
through dreams, that there is a deeper meaning to them.
Maybe this is true, but how do we ever know for certain
that this applies to everyone? There are many questions
to ask and be skeptical about that are in relation to
spirituality and science when coming across unknown
phenomena such as these, but we might as well reap the
benefits that our dreams may hold for us. Our mind is
able to diffuse out and reach another level of creativity
and craziness that is not bordered and restricted by our
own rational consciousness, letting us have the ability to

75
experience things in new and different ways. It is also for
this reason that students have found creative solutions
to problems after sleeping, as the brain reprograms itself
and reconnects with less often used neural pathways in
the brain circuit. Sleeping is also part of living, just a more
fantasy-like way of living that shouldn’t be ignored.
Another concern is to do with a more practical view
about how dreaming works. J. Allan Hobson suggested
the brain stem fired randomly which started the
dreaming process, but why would it even do that in the
first place? Is it doing this to compensate for the unusual
absence of other sensory signals during the night, or is
there something else that triggers it to fire signals? On
the subject of dreaming, there is no definite scope to see
how and why things work, which has therefore brought
about lots of theories. With everyone having different
experiences with dreaming, it is not easy to find a central
answer to this phenomenon. But through dreaming, we
can understand more about how we process things in
this world, and even why some others may experience
strange things that we call “abnormal”. So, here’s the
next step to understanding: Do the blind dream? And if
so, what do they look like? How are they created?

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Ways to Picture
There is no doubt to be some unreliability in the claims
that some congenitally blind people have about
dreaming visually, even though they have never actually
acquired visual sensations ever before in their life. Who
knows if what they define as “visual” is the same as what
we think it is? It is possible and more logical in a sense,
that what they describe as “visual” is merely just a
visuospatial map constructed out of their different
senses such as smell, hearing, taste, and touch to
determine what is situated around them. So do they
dream with their other senses? A 2014 study in the
journal Sleep Medicine suggests so.17 The study had a
group of 11 congenitally blind participants, 14
participants that were blind later after birth, and 25
sighted control participants. Over 4 weeks, researchers
collected dream reports from the participants about the
content of their dreams and specific details about them.
Both groups of blind participants had fewer visual
components in their dreams throughout the period
compared to the control group as the results indicated,
and the congenitally blind participants experienced more
“sensory diversity”, meaning they had more tactile,
olfactory, gustatory and auditory impressions. However,
the emotional and thematic dream content did not seem
to have many differences. The blind’s dreams are not just

77
reliant mostly on visual images for expressing the
narrative, but instead are more dispersed and mingled
with other sensations to form the experience.18
But what about the occipital lobe? Does it just remain
inactive for the rest of a blind person’s life? Not
necessarily. It seems that visual information can be still
achieved through an indirect entanglement with other
sensory information. Some blind people trained
themselves to use echolocation to navigate around their
environment, just like how bats or dolphins would. The
idea was those blind people could learn to make clicking
noises with their mouths to determine the location of
objects by the reflected noise resulting from their mouth
clicking.
Melvyn A. Goodale, director of the Brain and Mind
Institute at the University of Western Ontario, studied
the brain activity of two blind male subjects who seemed
to be experts at using echolocation.19 Daniel Kish was one
of them, who went blind at 13 months and now teaches
other blind people to use echolocation in their life.
Goodale was curious and amazed at the precision and
accuracy in which Kish and his 27-year old student were
able to tell objects apart from each other. "They can tell
a flat thing from convex. They can tell a bush from a wall,
a car from a lamp post," he said.

78
 Goodale used ƒMRI to record the brain’s activity as the
two subjects listened to their own echolocation clicks
and echoes, and he found that the echoes did not have
any significant effect on the auditory part of the brain
than any other sounds processed. But, the recording did
show activity in the visual part of the brain.

The figure shows the fMRI scan of a blind echolocation expert

compared to that of a sighted control participant who did not use
echolocation as they heard clicks and echoes; there is activation in
the visual cortex of the echolocation expert’s brain. (University of
Western Ontario)19

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 It suggested that the visual cortex was needed to
understand and analyse the echoes by creating a
visuospatial map of the sounds for navigation. Processing
the fact that there are echoes is one matter, but being
able to uncover their significance is another. The brain
was able to rewire itself to integrate sensory pathways
with the visual cortex so that the blind were able to cope
with their disability. Kish commented on echolocation,
saying: "I think this can be quite a liberating skill for the
blind. Not all blind people know about this and I think if
more did and more had an opportunity to learn, then,
they might find that their ability to understand the world
well beyond their bodies is much better than they think
it is."19 It seems, “vision” is not just as simple as looking
at a collection of coloured pigments.

Hallucinations
“I'm not strange, weird, off, nor crazy, my reality is just
different from yours.”
― Lewis Carroll20

Rosalie, an old lady in her 90s, claimed to be seeing

things. She was a resident of a nursing home, and the
people around her were concerned about what was
going on. They thought she had some stroke or
Alzheimer’s, or even had just gone crazy. That was when

80
Oliver Sacks, a British neurologist, was summoned to see
her.21
He could tell straight away that Rosalie was a perfectly
sane person and did not seem to have anything really
wrong with her. Even after going over a clinical
examination, he did not find any medical problems nor
find that she was using any medications that could have
produced hallucinations. And yet, she claimed that she
did have them. She said, “[I have seen] people in Eastern
dress, in drapes, walking up and down stairs. A man who
turns towards me and smiles. But he has huge teeth on
one side of his mouth. Animals too. I see a white building.
It's snowing, a soft snow. I see this horse with a harness,
dragging the snow away. Then, one night, the scene
changes. I see cats and dogs walking towards me. They
come to a certain point and then stop. Then it changes
again. I see a lot of children. They are walking up and
down stairs. They wear bright colors, rose and blue, like
[the] Eastern dress." Although she knew what she saw
were hallucinations, she was still frightened of them.
They seemed to be unrelated to what she was thinking,
feeling or doing. So what was the cause? After talking to
Rosalie, Oliver Sacks discovered one piece of information
that the nurses had not told him that was significant to
diagnosing what was really wrong with her: she had been
blind from macular degeneration for five years.

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 Rosalie had what was called Charles Bonnet syndrome
(CBS); it causes people who have it to see things that
aren’t really there, also known as hallucinations. This
syndrome is common to occur in people who have lost a
lot of vision, although that does not mean that they have
a mental health problem.22
Functional brain imaging has allowed researchers to
investigate regions of the brain during visual
hallucinations, and they have found that the visual cortex
isn’t the only part that is activated; the temporal lobe
activates too. The visual cortex helps to perceive and
“form” the images, but the temporal lobe is where the
sensory input really comes from. Within a region called
the medial temporal lobe, there are clusters of neurons
that are special and unique in their own way - each of
them activates very specifically to a given stimulus. A
neuron was found in this region that fired like crazy in a
patient with epilepsy when she was shown a photo of
Jennifer Aniston, leading to the discovery of other
individual neurons that responded similarly to other very
specific but different stimuli.23 This suggested that
specific neurons encode distinct representations of
places, objects, and people.
Not only is the temporal lobe involved with specific
representations, but it is also the location in which
sensory pathways cross. The five different sensory

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pathways pass each other, on their way to their
respective cortices. A person who has lost their vision
would have a lack of activity in the visual pathway.24 Just
like the echolocation experts, they have to rely on other
senses to help compensate for the loss of their sight so
they can still go through life with as little suffering as
possible. Sometimes, the other sensory systems have to
work extra hard in order to fill in the gaps caused by the
loss of one sense. At other times, the sensory systems are
willing to combine with the affected sensory system so
that it can also receive signals that are meant to be
processed through other pathways. In the unconscious
mind’s utmost effort to ensure that we have “complete”
narratives for what we experience, it is ready to ignore
the complaints from our conscious mind and use
whatever barrage of signals it can get its hands on to fill
in holes in our perception. They can be imperfect.
With a seamless stream of signals passing every day,
our mind acts as a machine to arrange, organize,
perceive, and translate them to create experiences that
are personally unique. It is this behaviour of the mind,
that makes disorders such as schizophrenia25 or CBS
possible. Deep within the mechanical works of these
disorders, there are underlying thinking and explanation
blocks that create how we see the world and how we see
ourselves, even if that means that our reality will seem

83
fabricated or “unstable”. If one can look beyond the
eccentricity of these disorders, they will uncover the side
of them that is full of logic and unrecognized sensibility.

Out of Focus
While imagination goes a long way, so does vision ---
even more than we think it might. Neglect syndrome, or
hemispatial neglect, reveals this fact clearly.26 A series of
neuropsychological tests are usually done to measure
the degree of neglect in a patient with this disorder, most
of which involve some sort of drawing activity. For
example, here are some of the captured drawing tests
done by those with left neglect:27

Bed screening tests for the assessment of neglect27

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 The tests represented here involved copying,
cancellation, and line bisection tasks. In figure A, patients
were asked to copy the drawing of a cube and a flower.
However, they were only able to copy out the right side
of the drawings and ignored the left side of the drawing.
In all the other figures, the same pattern of neglect
towards the left side of each task appears to be apparent.
Damage to the right inferior parietal lobe, a region
involved with attention, is implicated to be an underlying
cause of neglect. That means that a person who can
process visual stimuli perfectly and normally will not
necessarily be able to visually detect or recognize objects
clearly if their right parietal lobe is damaged. With a
person’s conscious vision partly removed, it’s like part of
the world is removed too from their view; that’s because
they are unable to become fully aware of some visual
stimuli, blurred by the damage to the right parietal lobe.
But does that mean they are completely “blind” to those
stimuli? Perhaps not. In a study done by John C. Marshall
and Peter W. Halligan, a patient with left-sided neglect
was shown pictures of either a house or a burning house
depicted with flames on the left side.28

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 Figure of houses used in Marshall and Halligan (1988)28,29

Although the patient consistently reported that both

houses looked exactly the same, she still chose the
normal house without the flames significantly more
times than the house with flames when asked which of
the two she would prefer to live in if she had to. Without
knowing exactly why, the patient felt more compelled to
choose one option over the other, even when they

86
seemed identical. She had no problem with visual
processing, it was just her attention that was impaired.
Inside, her visual system was still functioning normally
and picking up on stimuli of the images she saw. While
she was unable to confidently declare that one house
was burning, her unconscious system knew it. Her
unconscious mind was logically making the decision of
which house to live in for her even when it may have
merely seemed like a case of random selection to the
patient on a conscious level.
Vision is not just limited to the things we focus on, it
has a much broader perspective that is aware of stimuli
that we implicitly process too. Thus, these stimuli that
are unnoticeable to us can have the power to influence
our thoughts, actions, and emotions in secret, confusing
us and leaving us to wonder why we behaved a certain
way. To what extent do these stimuli really affect our
lives? And can this “hidden knowledge” of the
unconscious system, such as the fact that a house is
burning in flames, be the thing that forms our intuition?

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 5

Trusting Your Gut Feelings

“Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphoric mind a
sacred gift. He added that the rational mind was a faithful
servant. It is paradoxical that in the context of modern life we
have begun to worship the servant and defile the divine.” -
Bob Samples (The Metaphoric Mind: A Celebration of
Creative Consciousness)1

Hidden Messages and Marketing Scams

In a society now where forms of communication go well
beyond just using ink and paper, it is understandable that
people would be suspicious and skeptical about the ways
in which advertisements and brands attempt to influence
our opinions and trick us into agreeing with whatever
they state. A slow and observant walk down New York
City’s Times Square at night is already enough to leave a
person feeling dizzy under the burdening amount of
brightly-lit commercials present at that destination.
Advertisements are portrayed everywhere in daily life: at
bus stops, signposts, bookstores, subway stations,
cinemas, and on social media. They can be overwhelming

88
and unbearable, as our mind is put on the frontline to
fight against and shield off all the sneaky and clever
marketing tactics used by business commercials in
desperate attempts to manipulate our thoughts to match
their vision -- it is a psychological battle between
companies and the public.2,3
Commercials have discovered and used a strategy to
secretly manipulate, or as I like to say, “brainwash” minds
to become more compelled in doing what they wish
them to do. This strategy acts like a sneaky way to pollute
the thinking of oblivious victims without their full
consent as if hacking into a program and altering the
system using a virus that can go undetected. The strategy
is called subliminal messaging, and it makes sure that the
observer is not conscious of what the message is, but is
still able to process the message on an unconscious
level.3,4 How does it do this?
The first and most famous example of subliminal
images used in advertising was in 1957 when a market
researcher named James Vicary flashed slogans with the
words “Eat Popcorn” and “Drink Coca-Cola” into a
movie.4 The slogans were flashed as a single frame
directly on the movie screen but only for a quick period,
just long enough for the unconscious system of the
audience to pick up on the signal while still staying below
the threshold of their conscious awareness. Vicary

89
claimed that the hidden advertisements created an
18.1% increase in Coke sales and a 57.8% increase in
popcorn sales after the movie ended. Subliminal
messages are different from typical messages used for
advertising, in the way that it takes advantage of implicit
processing and ensures that people cannot consciously
perceive the messages, setting the perfect “trap” for
audience members to fall in. However, people later
found out that the results for this experiment were
actually fake, and it was all just a hoax. But more recent
studies have shown that the effects of subliminal
messages and images still have the potential to influence
behaviours in small ways.
In 1999, a Harvard study had participants play a
computer game while a series of words flashed before
their eyes across the screen for a few thousandths a
second.4 This speed prevented participants from
perceiving the words consciously, but still allowed
enough time for the words to be processed
unconsciously. Participants either received a set of
positive words such as “wise”, “astute”, and
“accomplished” while playing the computer game, or
received a set of negative words such as “senile”,
“dependent”, and “diseased”. And how did the sets of
words affect the participants’ behaviour? The study
found that those who received the positive set exited the

90
room significantly faster than those who received the
negative set, suggesting that the participants with the
negative words felt more discouraged despite not having
been consciously aware of any negative stimuli during
the computer game.
In another 2002 study published by Princeton
University, participants watched an episode of The
Simpsons. 12 frames of the word “thirsty” and 12 frames
of an image of a Coca-Cola can be added to the episode
in the same way as with the previous studies, and
participants rated themselves to be about 27 percent
thirstier after the show than before they watched it. The
control group that was not shown any subliminally added
frames were slightly less thirsty in comparison.5
While some other studies have gone as far to suggest
that subliminal tools can even influence our opinions on
political figures, to what extent are they actually
affecting us? Would a person really be willing to leave
home and go to a convenience store just to buy coke
after being subliminally “instructed” to do so by a coke
ad? Not exactly. Subliminal messages can influence
behaviour, but the persuasiveness of the content to
compel a person to act a certain way may have to depend
on how much the brain is processing at once. This, in
turn, is influenced by factors such as how many
distractions there are in the surrounding environment

91
other than the subliminal stimuli. With less processing
centers able to be spared because of other distractions,
less of the subliminal messages are able to be taken into
account, therefore the impact may not be as significant
as hoped for. And even when there are not a lot of
distractions present at the time of subliminal messaging,
it may not work as effectively if the message is something
unfamiliar. For example, a subliminal message that read
“Go order pepperoni pizza” probably wouldn’t work on a
vegetarian who hasn’t eaten pizza in a long time. Even a
busy conscious mind would halt its activities and
backtrack when alerted by a stimulus that seems just too
out of the ordinary to go unnoticed.
Subliminal messages don’t completely take control of
our behaviour, but they can nudge us towards a certain
direction. These little nudges, although seemingly
harmless at first glance, can have massive impacts on the
way we behave if incorporated into daily life more
frequently. Society has already tried to do this countless
times through ads (as we’ve seen), and some people
theorize it has even tried to do this through Disney
movies. Can overwhelming exposure to subliminal
messages eventually lead to our society becoming more
corrupted? Can our society eventually become more like
the dystopian version in George Orwell’s “1984” if an
authoritarian government were to cleverly use it as soft

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power? That would be a scary future. Little nudges have
the power to make our decision making biased without
clear and definite explanations because we are not
aware of them in action. These little nudges could be the
key units of our intuition, the understanding that does
not require conscious reasoning.

The Power of Thin-slicing

Would you believe that a person could predict with fairly
good certainty the chances of divorce for a married
couple only by eavesdropping on a single conversation
they were having at the dining table? That would take
some serious skills, wouldn’t it? But turns out, the
marriage researcher John Gottman would be able to
nearly do just that. He currently operates his own “love
lab”, a facility that couples can visit to measure the
success of their marriage in the future. Newlywed
couples would sit down facing each other and discuss a
problem for about 15 minutes, while pulse sensors would
be attached to their fingertips and the video camera
recording the whole conversation. After this process,
staff members at the facility would watch the video again
and predict whether they would divorce in the future.
Gottman has around a 90% success rate of predicting
whether a couple would still be married fifteen years
later just from observing their recorded 15-minute

93
conversation.6 In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink: The
Power of Thinking Without Thinking, it is revealed how
Gottman was able to do this.7
He had trained his staff to use a coding system which
he calls the SPAFF, to sort every conceivable emotion
that the married couple might express during the
conversation into twenty different categories. His staff
would attribute a SPAFF code to every second of the
couple’s interaction as they watch the video, then feed
the information into a mathematical equation. The data
from the sensors and electrodes attached to the couple
during their interaction would also be inputted into the
equation, and a complex mathematical calculation would
be performed on a computer model that would allow
Gottman to predict the chances of divorce. But in order
to obtain all the information that would be fed into the
calculation, the staff members had to be taught to
analyze the video very carefully --- they had to be able to
read every emotional nuance in facial expressions and
interpret random bits of dialogue. Analyzing was a crucial
step, as even the very fleeting details at one small section
of the interaction could convey a lot about the couple’s
relationship.
This process of taking and analyzing a narrow situation
to find general patterns and behaviours is an example of
conscious and deliberate thinking being used. Like

94
Gottman’s work, our unconscious system does this too,
but in an unconscious and much more automated way --
- the term used by psychologists for this is “thin-slicing”.
Humans often thin-slice when they are encountering a
new situation or when they meet new people. We have
to be able to make sense of things quickly in face of a new
situation to prepare ourselves, and our unconscious
system allows us to do just that effectively by thin-slicing.
This is why first impressions are so important; a person
you’ve never met before would be quick to judge and
make predictions about your character based on how
you present yourself within the first few minutes of
introduction. And once these predictions and judgments
have been made (regardless of whether the person is
aware or unaware of them at the time), it is sometimes
too late to change them.
Samuel Gosling, an associate professor of psychology
at the University of Texas at Austin demonstrated how
observers could predict the personality of strangers just
by judging the surrounding space they used.8,9 At one
part of the experiment, seven observers looked at the 83
bedrooms of college students or recent graduates living
on or near the college campus and were asked to predict
the degree in which five major personality traits,
collectively called the “Big Five”, were present in each
bedroom of the occupant.9 The “Big Five” consisted of

95
openness, conscientiousness, extroversion,
agreeableness, and emotional stability. At the other part
of the study, eight observers went through the same
procedure but in the context of being presented with 94
offices occupied by employees in five professions:
banking, real estate, architecture, advertising, and one
business school. Almost all the observers agreed with
each other on their evaluations of the personalities of the
strangers, and their assessments also proved to be highly
accurate. The observers never even met these strangers
before, yet they were still able to get a pretty good idea
of the kind of people they were just by observing the
space they used. Most of the observers said they looked
at specific items and decorating styles to help them form
their judgments, but the authors of the study were still
puzzled by how they were able to predict the emotional
stability of the strangers so well--- there didn’t seem to
be any obvious indication for that personality trait in the
occupant’s spaces. This unexplained mystery could be
part of the amazing deduction that the unconscious mind
engages in when trying to come up with patterns and
conclusions.
In an impressively short period of time (and I mean
really short), the unconscious system is able to filter the
numerous details contained within just a small sample of
input and choose the most relevant and useful bits of

96
information for interpretation, cutting us the slack of
having to spend an unnecessarily long period of time to
contemplate and make decisions. Don’t underestimate
the powerful underlying mechanics of the unconscious
system--- as mysterious as it is, chances are it’s the most
reliable source in times of emergency and is there for us
whenever we need to make snap decisions.

“Feels Like Home”

Mary was a 40-year-old woman who did not have a very
good relationship with her 9-year-old daughter, Sarah.
The reason? Because she did not believe that Sarah was
her real daughter. Mary claimed that her real daughter
was placed in the custody of Child Protective Services and
was replaced by a look-alike impostor when in reality
there was never another “Sarah”.10 On one occasion,
Mary even arrived at her daughter’s school, screaming,
“Give me my real daughter; I know what you’ve done.”
Mary was diagnosed with Capgras syndrome,11 leaving
her with the delusion that her daughter was replaced by
a duplicate. Patients diagnosed with this syndrome have
difficulty with recognising people, due to some error in
the brain’s facial recognition system; as a result, these
people may feel skeptical towards the people they are
close to--- although they may look, sound, and behave
the same as the person Capgras syndrome patients are

97
thinking of, they don’t “feel” like the same person. For
some people out there, the brain’s most rational
explanation to this feeling that “something is off” is to
draw on the conclusion that the person is an impostor.
And if the brain really believes this, it becomes the
person’s truth and ongoing belief.
The causes of Capgras syndrome are still unclear, but
there have been many similar neuropsychological
theories. When we see and recognise a face, the visual
pathway isn’t the only pathway that’s activated--- the
emotional pathway is too. The fusiform gyrus is part of
the temporal and occipital lobe which serves to help
identify a person’s face. It triggers the activation of a
separate pathway that eventually leads to the amygdala,
a center known for processing emotional responses,
allowing the feeling of familiarity to be integrated with
the visual perception of a person’s face once it is
recognised. Neuroscientists suggest that brain damage
harms the physical structure of the amygdala which
breaks the connection between visual recognition and
emotional recognition, therefore patients with Capgras
syndrome find it difficult to process a familiar person’s
face without the amygdala’s emotional reassurance to
confirm that the person they see is indeed someone they
know. In other words, with this “emotional detachment”
from the visual system, Capgras syndrome patients find

98
it hard to comfortably accept people close to them (I
imagine that the absence of confirmation from the
emotional center to be experienced as a numb and
distant feeling, a result of the lacking stimuli from
emotion which also causes the feeling that something is
missing).
Now, let’s go a bit deeper. How significantly do
emotions influence whether we can recognise objects?
Could this suggest that human beings have reliance or
dependency upon emotions to dictate information? A
logical and common thought process for recognizing a
person’s identity would be that anyone who matches
(very similar to) the behaviour, physical features, and
characteristics of a person you have met before in life
should most likely be just that same person. And yet, this
logical thinking can be completely altered if emotions
were to say otherwise, as Capgras syndrome patients
have demonstrated. What has caused humans to rely on
emotions so much? It’s already known that emotions
very much affect the body’s bioregulation to respond to
situations in the external environment: our palms sweat
when we’re anxious or nervous, our heart beats rapidly
when we’re scared, we blush when we’re embarrassed.
These are all signs from the body, an expression of
emotions and feelings through biological and regulatory
means.

99
 Antonio Damasio proposed the “Somatic Marker
Hypothesis”, which stated that emotions and feelings
gave rise to responses in the body (such as a rapid
heartbeat in response to fear) known as “somatic
markers” that guide behaviour, particularly decision-
making.12 This way, what goes on inside is able to be
communicated to the outside through somatic markers;
and with this same idea in mind, the unconscious system
can contribute its knowledge and lead decision making to
be more biased. If this is really the origins of gut feelings,
then they should be appreciated as factors just as
important to decision making in daily life as conscious
thinking and reasoning. Sometimes, there really isn’t
anything wrong with the justification that we made a
certain decision for no other reason than just because we
felt like it.

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 6

Not Just a 3-Pound Organ

“The brain is wider than the sky.” - Emily Dickinson1

We’ve only taken a brief tour around the many wonders

of the brain; in reality, our brains have only just got
comfortable getting acquainted with itself. The many
things I have tried to touch upon in this book are only the
tip of the iceberg in the field of neuroscience. Beneath
the surface, you will find that there is still much unknown
to us waiting to be discovered by intellectual and creative
minds.2
It sounds like a blessing: in every one of us, there
exists a brain. An astrophysicist and neuroscience team
once compared the brain to the cosmic web and found
that both the neuronal and galaxy networks were
remarkably similar.3 The observable universe contains
100 billion galaxies, around the same number of neurons
that there are in the brain. While the cosmic web consists
of a combination of stars, gas and dark matter, the brain
consists of a combination of water, fat, and white and
gray matter. It takes 1 to 10 petabytes of data for the

101
smallest computer program to predict the behaviour of
the cosmic network, and in comparison, the memory
capacity of the human brain is around 2.5 petabytes. As
the researchers put it, “The entire life experience of a
person can also be encoded into the distribution of
galaxies in our universe.” This 3-pound, jelly-like organ
that is both beautifully delicate and fragile only
constitutes a small portion of our amazing body, and yet
it plays an undeniably essential role in helping us
experience this wonderful world. We hold in our skulls
the most complex object in the universe.4,5

102
 Epilogue

In the process of creating this book, I really put thought

into how I would introduce different mental disorders.
There seems to be an invisible barrier for those
diagnosed with a psychiatric condition, because not
much has been understood about mental illnesses
compared to other more physical medical illnesses.1 But
actually, there is very little difference between a medical
condition and a mental condition. As much as our
physical health is important, our mental health is too; the
latter has just as much of an impact on quality of life as
the former. Think about it: A physical medical illness like
diabetes could affect a person’s lifestyle in terms of what
they would eat, how they would exercise, or how they
plan their day because of blood glucose levels. Similarly,
a mental illness such as depression could also affect a
person’s lifestyle in these ways but because of different
factors such as loss of motivation or fatigue. And so,
people should really focus on addressing the issue of
mental illnesses in today’s society like how they would
address any other medical illness.
Maybe we could slowly start to see mental disorders
such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder as being not so
different from diseases like malaria or asthma. They

103
could be recognized, understood and accepted in today’s
society as also a reason to be excused from work or as a
reason to take sick leave. Maybe students would have
just as much reason to go to the school nurse when they
are not mentally well as when they would have a
stomach flu. Remember that mental illnesses do also
have a biological basis, and therefore should be treated
in the same manner as other medical illnesses. Cures
wouldn’t necessarily have to require a list of
antidepressants or drug prescriptions either; a short talk
or sign of compassion is just as simple of a cure enough
to help a person suffering mentally to literally make the
synaptic connections in the brain needed to heal.

104
 Notes
Preface

1. Eliezer J."Neurologic: The Brain’s Hidden Rationale Behind

Our Irrational Behavior” Random House USA, Dec. 2016

Introduction

1. De Saint-Exupery, Antoine. “Le Petit Prince” Gallimard,

France, 1945

1. Neuroplasticity

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8. "Cache Cab: Taxi Drivers' Brains Grow to Navigate London's
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2. Habits

1. Quote by Criss Jami

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16. "When Your Hand Has a Mind of Its Own." Invisibilia,
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3. Imagination Can Go A Long Way

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4. How We Perceive The World

1. " Quote by Vincent Van Gogh:" I Dream My Painting and I

Paint My Dream." Good Reads,
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034

6. Not Just a 3-Pound Organ

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Epilogue

1. Malla, Ashok et al. "Mental illness is like any other medical

illness": a critical examination of the statement and its
impact on patient care and society" Journal of psychiatry &
neuroscience: JPN vol. 40, no. 3, 2015, pp. 147-50.

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119