If you cannot always elicit a straight answer from the unconscious brain, how can you access its knowledge? Sometimes the trick is merely to probe what your gut is telling you. So the next time a friend laments that she cannot decide between two options, tell her the easiest way to solve her problem: flip a coin. She should specify which option belongs to heads and which to tails, and then let the coin fly. The important part is to assess her gut feeling after the coin lands. If she feels a subtle sense of relief at being "told" what to do by the coin, that's the right choice for her.

As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems.

Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.

The drives you take for granted ("I'm a hetero/homosexual," "I'm attracted to children/adults," "I'm aggressive/not aggressive," and so on) depend on the intricate details of your neural machinery.

To a space alien or a German Shepherd dog, two humans would be indistinguishable, just as attractive and unattractive space aliens and German Shepherd dogs are difficult for you to tell apart.

The first lesson about trusting your senses is: don't. Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it's true, that doesn't mean it is true.

Even while it's true that we are tied to our molecules and proteins and neurons - as strokes and hormones and drugs and microorganisms indisputably tell us - it does not logically follow that humans are best described only as pieces and parts.