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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. Of what is the phenomenon of depth being stimulated on a flat page an example?

2. Whose brains must learn to make sense of visual input coming in?

3. What do our conscious minds remain unaware of in the analogy Eagleman offers?

4. What is the most important part of seeing?

5. How does Alberts convince one African that the native's tongue is still intact?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Eagleman describe in the opening chapter?

2. What happens to a blind person who recovers his/her sight?

3. What is the simple experiment Eagleman asks the reader to perform?

4. How can the brain see without eyes and what is one way this is possible?

5. What is one example Eagleman gives of how one reacts to something before the person is even aware of the situation?

6. What does Eagleman say our intuition tells us about our experience of the world and is the intuition accurate?

7. What does Eagleman say Sigmund Freud understood?

8. What has to shift in order to fully appreciate the small role of the unconscious and to what does Eagleman compare that shift?

9. Why is it an advantage to be able to do things without the use of the conscious mind?

10. What is one way to measure how our unconscious minds affect our conscious thinking without our even knowing it?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Incognito belongs to the non-fiction genre. Discuss the following:

1. Define the literary term "genre" and give several examples of three other genres in addition to the non-fiction genre.

2. Discuss two reasons why it might be useful to label a text by genre and two reasons it might be disadvantageous to label a text by genre.

3. What do you think is the difference between a nonfiction book and a novel?

Essay Topic 2

What we like is also determined largely by unconscious thinking and a natural tendency to like ourselves, Eagleman claims. This is called "implicit egotism," and is a well-established phenomenon, he explains. It is illustrated by the fact, for example, that people marry others with first names that start with the same letter more often than would be expected by chance. Eagleman claims this is because we implicitly prefer others that are like ourselves in some way.

1. Discuss how you feel about yourself and whether you think your feelings stem from your unconscious. Use examples from your own life and Incognito to support your answer.

2. Do you think most people like themselves? Why or why not. Use examples from your own life and Incognito to support your answer.

3. Do you think it is a positive trait that a person likes him/herself? Why or why not? Use examples from your own life and Incognito to support your answer.

Essay Topic 3

Eagleman presents the example of an experiment where men were shown photographs of the faces of several women and asked to rate their attractiveness. Photographs where the women's eyes had been dilated were consistently ranked as more attractive. When asked why they had chosen some women as more attractive than others, the subjects did not mention the dilated eyes as a factor, yet they clearly were. Eagleman adds that dilated pupils in a woman indicate a state of sexual arousal, suggesting that the subjects who found these photos more attractive were acting on a natural impulse of their unconscious minds.

1. Do you think attraction is a conscious choice or and unconscious one? Why or why not? Use examples from your own life and Incognito to support your answer.

2. Discuss one situation in which you were attracted to something, e.g. a person, a food dish, a car, etc. but were not sure why you felt the way you did and relate it to Eagleman's idea of unconscious attraction. Use examples from your own life and Incognito to support your answer.

3. If Eagleman is correct about why men might be attracted to a woman, what do you think that might mean about most marriages? Use examples from your own life and Incognito to support your answer.

(see the answer keys)

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