One might suspect neuroscientists, as opposed to lay people, to be so familiar with the low-level hardware of the brain that they have come to understand just how to think about such mysteries as consciousness and free will. And yet often it turns out to be quite the opposite: many neuroscientists’ great familiarity with the low-level aspects of the brain makes them skeptical that consciousness and free will could ever be explained in physical terms at all. So baffled are they by what strikes them as an unbridgeable chasm between mind and matter that they abandon all efforts to see how consciousness and selves could come out of physical processes, and instead they throw in the towel and become dualists. It’s a shame to see scientists punt in this fashion, but it happens all too often. The moral of the story is that being a professional neuroscientist is not by any means synonymous with understanding the brain deeply - no more than being a professional physicist is synonymous with understanding hurricanes deeply. Indeed, sometimes being mired down in gobs of detailed knowledge is the exact thing that blocks deep understanding.