You gleefully say, "I just thought of something!", when in fact your brain performed an enormous amount of work before your moment of genius struck. When an idea is served up from behind the scenes, your neural circuitry has been working on it for hours or days or years, consolidating information and trying out new combinations. But you take credit without further wonderment at the vast, hidden machinery behind the scenes.

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."

After all, across the population there are slight differences in brain function, and sometimes these translate directly into different ways of experiencing the world. And each individual believes his way is reality.

We're trapped on this very thin slice of perception ... But even at that slice of reality that we call home, we're not seeing most of what's going on.

Everybody knows the power of deadlines - and we all hate them. But their effectiveness is undeniable.

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.

Imbalance of reason and emotion may explain the tenacity of religion in societies: world religions are optimized to tap into the emotional networks, and great arguments of reason amount to little against such magnetic pull.