Despite their improved skill, these trainees, like the experts, were unable to describe exactly which characteristics of the chick allowed them to make the gender call. By examining chick after chick and being told whether they were right or wrong, a novice chicken sexer could eventually achieve a high level of accuracy. Chicken sexers, for example, learned to differentiate male and female chicks only by being trained by experienced sexers.

He describes how chicken sexers and airplane spotters could learn to perform their function without being able to describe how they knew what they were doing.

In the same chapter, Eagleman ventures into some of the territory mined in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. He points out that often our conscious mind can’t even duplicate the sequence of events in an action like changing lanes while driving, something we can do effortlessly while behind the wheel. In a chapter amusingly titled, “Mind: The Gap,” Eagleman describes “implicit memory” – our ability to perform actions like driving a car or typing without conscious thought. Rather, he uses those occasional failures, like seeing color gradients that don’t really exist, to lead into a better understanding of how our brains actually do work. Unlike so many pop-neuroscience books today, though, Eaglemen doesn’t focus exclusively on how our brains don’t work as expected. In one chapter, he looks at our senses and how optical illusions can fool us. Incognito is a look inside our heads: Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, looks at various aspects of how our brains work and how those functions manifest themselves in our behavior. Book Review: Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

Incognito eagleman