How Much do You Know About Your Own Brain?

We tend to believe we're aware of what's happening in our own brains, and also in conscious control of our behavior. But a growing body of neuroscience and psychology research demonstrates that most of what happens inside the brain-- including the processes that cause us to select and execute behaviors-- is beyond our conscious awareness. This has important implications for our eating behavior, body weight, and health, as I explore in my upcoming book The Hungry Brain.

Let me give you a straightforward example that illustrates how little of our brain's activity we're aware of. It focuses on information processing by the visual system, which is one of the best-understood systems of the brain. I drew the basic facts of this example from a recent talk by the accomplished neuroscience researcher Marcus Raichle, who studies patterns of activity in the human brain.

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