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Incognito The Secret Lives Of The Brain Sparknotes

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David Eagleman’s Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain is a book about the depths of the brain and how one’s conscience affects him daily. Through this work, Eagleman discusses how the mind drives people to act on certain behaviors. Eagleman further proves through practical facts that there is a significant association with the conscious and subconscious mind. Eagleman shows with scientific credibility, metaphors, and rhetorical questions that people should be able to trust their senses.
Eagleman uses science references at the beginning of the book because he wants to establish credibility with his audience. Eagleman trying to establish credibility with his audience so that the audience is about to trust his words. “Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) liked to believe that human actions came about from deliberation about what is good… No one watered this seed for four hundred years, until the Polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) proposed that the mind is a melding of accessible and inaccessible parts” (12-13). With this quote, Eagleman is trying to prove to the audience that his words are worthy of being trusted. “So why did reductionism catch on in the first place? To understand this we only need to examine its historical roots. Over recent centuries, thinking men and women watched the growth of deterministic …show more content…

“Inspired by this art of consensus building, Abraham Lincoln chose to place adversaries William Seward and Salmon Chase in his presidential cabinet. He was choosing, in the memorial phase of historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, a team of rivals. Rivalrous teams are central in modern political strategy” (109). Eagleman uses Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet as an example to compare to how rivals can be advantageous to the brain. This example provides the framework for the rest of the chapter which helps the audience to start to understand what he will be talking

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