If you measure someone's brain and see very little activity during a task, it does not necessarily indicate that they're not trying - it more likely signifies that they have worked hard in the past to burn the programs into the circuitry. Consciousness is called in during the first phase of learning and is excluded from the game playing after it is deep in the system.

Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia - hundreds of billions of them. Each one of these cells is as complicated as a city.

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.

The brain runs its show incognito.

The brain internally simulates what will happen if you were to perform some action under specific conditions. Internal models not only play a role in motor acts (such as catching or dodging) but also underlie conscious perception.

If an epileptic seizure is focused in a particular sweet spot in the temporal lobe, a person won´t have motor seizures, but instead something more subtle. The effect is something like a cognitive seizure, marked by changes of personality, hyperreligiosity (an obsession with religion and feelings of religious certainity), hypergraphia (extensive writing on a subject, usually about religion), the false sense of an external presence, and, often, the hearing voices that are attributed to a god. Some fraction of history´s prophets, martyrs, and leaders appear to have had temporal lobe epilepsy.

What has always surprised me when I walk into a bookstore is the number of books that you can find that are written with certainty. The authors tell some story as though it's true, but they don't have any evidence that it is true!