This singular anatomical structure, composed entirely of organic compounds and locked for a lifetime in the darkness of the skull, makes possible everything we value about life.

Marvin Minsky, co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, thinks of the brain as a society—a society of subassemblies cooperating to learn about the world.251 The image can easily be reversed. A society is a brain, a learning device that works according to the principles that drive a neural net.

Using mindsight to focus our attention in ways that integrate these neural circuits can be seen as a form of “brain hygiene.”