Brains are like representative democracies. They are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices.

We are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe.

Think about the brain as the densest concentration of youness. It's the peak of the mountain, but not the whole mountain.

This is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.

This is the hallmark of a robust biological system: political parties can perish in a tragic accident and the society will still run, sometimes with little more than a hiccup to the system. It may be that for every strange clinical case in which brain damage leads to a bizarre change in behavior or perception, there are hundreds of cases in which parts of the brain are damaged with no detectable clinical sign.

As Carl Jung put it, "In each of us there is another whom we do not know." As Pink Floyd sang, "There's someone in my head, but it's not me."

Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.