I finally finished reading a book that's been on my shelf for a few years. Called "Incognito", it has the sub-title "the secret lives of the brain" and its author David Eagleman sets out to address such questions as why (or how) your foot hits the brake-pedal even before you are consciously aware of danger ahead.
Some of the material is reasonably straightforward and easy to grasp; other parts - especially where science meets philosophy, as in one section about blame and justice - well, other parts are harder and require concentrated swathes of reading-time that I don't often have. I just couldn't seem to manage to get to the end.
The strange thing was that, when I picked up the book again, determined to finish it, I discovered that I had almost finished; in fact, the final chapter was left, and it was a true "concluding" chapter in that it summed up all the key ideas in the book. I felt both relieved and pleased, and at the same time a bit annoyed at myself: I had stopped just before the end. As I write that down, I realise it's something - a phenomenon - I've read about elsewhere: that we sometime give up just before we are actually about to reach our goal.
That's quite a strange discovery: in completing the book, I not only received a re-cap of all the main points, but I received a reminder of a quite different lesson altogether.
Your brain is much, much more complicated than you realize.
And you are much, much closer to your goal than you think you are.
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