A lecture on brain research
"Your brain plays tricks on you": it was about neuroscience, of course, but also about questioning how our brains work.
Albert Moukheiber is also the author of "Neuromania" and "Le cerveau pas bête".
For Albert Moukheiber, beliefs are either inert (they change nothing for us when they change) or they are performative: when someone tells you something or when the environment changes, it has an impact on your life. For example, as a student, a teacher makes a comment to you. What makes us decide? What factors can influence our internal maps?
According to Albert Moukheiber, our perception is partial, our attention is limited, and the world is complex.
How does our brain work?
In spite of everything, our brain works because we perceive, interpret and communicate with our environment.
Albert Moukheiber tells us that we have 9 senses, because we have to add proprioception (the sense of the body in space), equilibrioception (the sense of balance), thermoception (the sense of temperature), nociception (the sense of pain).
Albert Moukheiber tells us that our brain completes what we see by hallucinating the world. It's as if my brain plugs up the holes in my perception to arrive at my vision of the world. In fact, most of the time we are surrounded by incomplete information.
Our personality is the way the individual stabilizes the ambiguity of the field: from a priori or from ambiguous bistable stimuli.
For example, an optimistic person stabilizes his or her thinking by assuming that the future will be good.
Does the environment affect our brain?
So we don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
1st order thinking is what we think about ourselves
2nd order thinking is what we think about others.
And 3rd order thinking is what others think of you.
After that, communication plays its part because we operate in an approximate and predictive way, with automatisms.
Albert tells us that we must learn to resist our automatic thoughts.
We are used to making loops of understanding between the brain, others, and the body, and as a result our brains are context dependent.
By extension, when we measure, this can interfere with the goal.
Example: A student is graded, and instead of learning for himself, he crams to get a good grade.
According to Albert Moukheiber, science is still in its infancy when it comes to understanding the brain, and we must remain humble in the face of ongoing discoveries.