Eagleman canters through various well-known neurological cases, none original to this book, in which criminal acts or radical changes in personality have been shown to be the result of brain damage or disease. Nor have we needed the finer developments of functional neuroanatomy to tell us that brain damage causes changes in behaviour, thus undermining simplistic notions of free will or criminal culpability. We got that much not only from Freud but from romantic poetry and 19th-century Russian novels. We haven't needed fMRI scans, or software metaphors of brain circuitry, to tell us that we are subject to non-conscious drives that override our limited rational faculties. As an enthusiast of Freudian models of the unconscious, it should be perfectly apparent to Eagleman that the decentering of the conscious mind took place long before the rise of contemporary neuroscience. This interpretation of modern intellectual development is ahistorical and incorrect. We should not worry about all this "decentering", Eagleman concludes, because science shows us that brain and mind and life are even more wondrous and exciting than we thought.
Hence, most of our mental operations occur "incognito". Brain science, Eagleman believes, provides the final frontier in our understanding of our own littleness and contingency: the realisation that consciousness is not the centre of the mind but a limited and ambivalent function in a vast cosmological circuitry of non-conscious neurological functions. Man's sense of self has been rocked by key scientific revolutions in our understanding of the universe: the discovery that earth was not its centre, that time is deep not shallow, that humans were not God-created but a product of evolution. What are these implications? First, the process of learning more about the brain has changed our idea of what it means to be human.
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