Team of Rivals
The computer scientist, Marvin Minsky, has suggested that minds work via the society-of-mind framework, writes David Eagleman in his awesome book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain : “Minsky suggested that human minds may be collections of enormous numbers of machinelike, connected subagents that are themselves mindless.” Eagleman takes that framework further and says it “runs on conflict”! Different parts of the brain don’t always agree and don’t work cooperatively: “As a result, you can accomplish the strange feats of arguing with yourself, cursing at yourself, and cajoling yourself to do something.” Perhaps it’s based on how evolution works: “Biology never checks off a problem and calls it quits. It reinvents solutions continually. The end product of that approach is a highly overlapping system of solutions – the necessary condition for a team-of-rivals architecture .” Eagleman cites the Stroop test as Exhibit A for this view. Here’s the test: “Name the col...