Chapter 2 The Testimony of the Senses: What Is Experience Really Like? Summary and Analysis

Our intuition tells us that we experience the world as it actually exists, Eagleman explains in chapter two. But we are actually unaware of most of what is happening. We can move an arm and be aware that it has moved, but we are unconscious of the flurry of neural impulses that caused the arm to move. Eagleman proposes an analogy that consciousness is like a newspaper, where complicated processes have been compressed into headlines. We read these "headlines" with our conscious minds while remaining unaware of the full "story."

Eagleman first turns to vision. About one-third of the brain is devoted to vision, he explains, indicating the extremely complex nature of the process. While seeing seems natural to most people...