As you are reading this sentence, your brain is (1) importing a stream of pixels from your retinas, (2) detecting features of these squiggles to perceive them as letters, (3) combining the letters into words, (4) finding the meaning of each word in the mental dictionary you memorized in childhood, (5) assembling the phrase fragments into sentences by hardwired rules of syntax, and finally—and here we cross from the subconscious to the semiconscious—(6) checking the validity of each statement vis-à-vis your mental encyclopedia of accrued knowledge [179, 2271, 2648, 2693]. We take reading for granted. We shouldn't. It is a remarkable feat of information processing [2298, 2842].

Our brain is the most complex machine on earth. It is a “great raveled knot” [1003] that sets us apart from all other animals [638, 2575] by enabling us to imagine what could be, not just to see things as they are [594, 2037]. Despite centuries of probing its properties and decades of tracing its wiring, no one has ever managed to crack its code. Many have died trying, including titans such as Francis Crick [534, 2393, 2480], who had earlier, with James Watson, solved the jigsaw puzzle of DNA. That puzzle was child's play, however, compared with the Gordian knot of the human mind. How the mind works is the last great mystery in biology [1686, 2356]. If only we knew the answer to that riddle, then we might be able to figure out how it evolved [213, 253].

Our mind is the one quirk that's always been our greatest source of pride [2466], but are we deluding ourselves to believe that the way we think is qualitatively unique on planet Earth [1014, 1247, 2078, 2866]?.