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at minimum, more tightly constrained than previously considered.
    By the middle of the twentieth century, thinkers began to appreciate that we know ourselves very little. We are not at the centerof ourselves, but instead—like the Earth in the Milky Way, and the Milky Way in the universe—far out on a distant edge, hearing little of what is transpiring.

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    Freud’s intuition about the unconscious brain was spot-on, but he lived decades before the modern blossoming ofneuroscience. We can now peer into the human cranium at many levels, from electrical spikes in single cells to patterns of activation that traverse the vast territories of the brain. Our modern technology has shaped and focused our picture of the inner cosmos, and in the following chapters we will travel together into its unexpected territories.
    How is it possible to get angry at yourself: who, exactly, is mad at whom? Why do rocks appear to climb upward after you stare at a waterfall? Why did Supreme Court Justice William Douglas claim that he was able to play football and go hiking, when everyone could see that he was paralyzed after a stroke? Why was Topsy the elephant electrocuted byThomas Edison in 1916? Why do people love to store their money in Christmas accounts that earn no interest? If the drunkMel Gibson is an anti-Semite and the sober Mel Gibson is authentically apologetic, is there a real Mel Gibson? What do Ulysses and the subprime mortgage meltdown have in common? Why do strippers make more money at certain times of month? Why are people whose name begins with J more likely to marry other people whose name begins with J? Why are we so tempted to tell a secret? Are some marriage partners more likely to cheat? Why do patients on Parkinson’s medications become compulsive gamblers? Why didCharles Whitman, a high-IQ bank teller and former Eagle Scout, suddenly decide to shoot forty-eight people from the University of Texas Tower in Austin?
    What does all this have to do with the behind-the-scenes operations of the brain?
    As we are about to see, everything.

The Testimony of the Senses: What IsExperience
Really
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DECONSTRUCTING EXPERIENCE
     
    One afternoon in the late 1800s, the physicist and philosopherErnst Mach took a careful look at some uniformly colored strips of paper placed next to each other. Being interested in questions of perception, he was given pause by something: the strips did not look quite right. Something was amiss. He separated the strips, looked at them individually, and then put them back together. He finally realized what was going on: although each strip in isolation was uniform in color, when they were placed side by side each appeared to have a gradient of shading: slightly lighter on the left side, and slightly darker on the right. (To prove to yourself that each strip in the figure is in fact uniform in brightness, cover up all but one.) 1

     
    Mach bands.
     
    Now that you are aware of this illusion of “Mach bands,” you’ll notice it elsewhere—for example, at the corner where two walls meet, the lighting differences often make it appear that the paint is lighter or darker right next to the corner. Presumably, even though the perceptual fact was in front of you this entire time, you have missed it until now. In the same way, Renaissance painters noticed at some point that distant mountains appeared to be tinted a bit blue—and once this was called out, they began to paint them that way. But the entire history of art up to that point had missed it entirely, even though the data was unhidden in front of them. Why do we fail to perceive these obvious things? Are we really such poor observers of our own experiences?
    Yes. We are astoundingly poor observers. And ourintrospection is useless on these issues: we believe we’re seeing the world just fine until it’s called to our attention that we’re not. We will go through a process of learning to observe our experience, just as Mach