Our cognition fools us into thinking we’re in charge
I’m on a mission — one that flies in the face of so-called intuition and common sense. My mission is to describe how our human consciousness, our higher-order cognition, doesn’t work the way we think it does. We believe — more than that — we know our day-to-day consciousness enables us to perceive our environment, dictates how we make decisions and how we respond to situations. We all feel that without our consciousness, we wouldn’t be able to function. We would be like a body without bones, just a flaccid blob of inaction.
However, in a blow to our most fervently-held convictions, science has shown that our consciousness doesn’t actually work as if it’s the homunculus in charge, the tiny person inside our head controlling and dictating our life. While the evidence for this is rather overwhelming, I only want to introduce the idea here. What follows is just a bare-bones summary of findings from decades of recent neuroscience and psychology research. Going forward I will flesh out many aspects of these assertions and examine the scientific research that leads to these conclusions.
In their paper, Conscious thought is for facilitating social and cultural interactions: How mental simulations serve the animal-culture interface, Professors of Psychology Roy…
