The Brain: The Story of You

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The writing in the book proper consists of scientific info combined with historical case studies. This is also a format that I feel really works in books, and it worked in this presentation, as well. In the current world, we sadly have enough examples of this. Eagleman gives us a fascinating example of a school experiment, and indicates how education can teach children about the dangers of dehumanisation. The author leaves the troublesome question of free will unresolved - apparently the jury is still out on that one.) I think of consciousness as the CEO of a large sprawling corporation, with many thousands of subdivisions and departments all collaborating and interacting and competing in different ways. Small companies don’t need a CEO – but when an organization reaches sufficient size and complexity, it needs a CEO to stay above the daily details and to craft the long-view of the company.

Eagleman gets the writing here off to a great start, with a well-written intro. He's got an excellent writing style that is both interesting and engaging. The book is very readable.From the renowned neuroscientist and New York Times bestselling author of Incognito comes the companion volume to the international PBS series about how your life shapes your brain, and how your brain shapes your life. Describes consciousness. “…the conscious you is only the smallest part of the activity of your brain. Your actions, your beliefs and your biases are all driven by networks in your brain to which you have no conscious access.” “I think of consciousness as the CEO of a large sprawling corporation, with many thousands of subdivisions and departments all collaborating and interacting and competing in different ways.”

Kitabı çox bəyəndim❤yazar beynimizlə bağlı bir çox maraqlı məqama toxunaraq, başqa problemlər üçün də həll yollarını göstərmiş, yaxud bu yolda gedən prosesləri izah etmişdir. Couples married for a long time begin to resemble each other. The longer they’ve been married, the stronger the effect Now coming to the ghost in the machine - what is the self? Is it only the electrical impulses generated in the hardware of the brain? But even the brain is not unchanging:

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The show and its companion book by Eagleman, “The Brain: The Story of You,” are testaments to the neuroscientist’s fervent belief in the relevance of his field to ordinary people.” – NY Magazine So strap in for a whistle-stop tour into the inner cosmos. In the infinitely dense tangle of billions of brain cells and their trillions of connections, I hope you’ll be able to squint and make out something that you might not have expected to see in there. You. The formatting of the book is also very well done. It is broken into well-defined chapters; each chapter into blurbs of writing with relevant headers at the top. I really like books formatted in this manner, and find it optimal for absorbing the information presented. Author David Eagleman is an American neuroscientist, writer, and science communicator. He teaches neuroscience at Stanford University and is CEO and co-founder of Neosensory, a company that develops devices for sensory substitution. David Eagleman’s wide-ranging roundup of the current state of knowledge about the brain is concise, accessible and often very surprising. It’s a strange new world inside your head.” – Brian Eno

Bu kitab düşüncələrimi dəyişdi. Artıq öz atdığım addımlara, düşüncələrimə, duyğularıma, hər bir kiçicik bədən hərəkətlərimə diqqət yetirməyə və əslində beynimizin necə mürəkkəb və möhtəşəm bir üzvümüz olduğunu anlamağa başlayıram. In summary, this book exemplifies my love for science. Eagleman is a master of his craft and a skilled writer. He covers complex topics on the neuroscience with ease and provides the general public with an appetizer of knowledge. Neuroscience is a fascinating field in it is infancy and Eagleman successfully whets the public’s interest. I highly recommend it! In the fine tradition of Carl Sagan, Eagleman shows that science is captivating without hyped embellishment, and, if you pay attention, you’ll find yourself immersed in it.” – Forbes As Harris puts it, by shutting down the systems that see the homeless person as a fellow human, one doesn’t have to experience the unpleasant pressures of feeling bad about not giving money. In other words, the homeless have become dehumanised: the brain is viewing them more like objects and less like people. As Harris explains: “If you don’t properly diagnose people as human beings, then the moral rules that are reserved for human people may not apply.” Even before they can walk or talk, babies have the tools to make judgments about others. The brain comes with inborn instincts to detect who’s trustworthy, and who isn’tThe human brain undergoes substantial development throughout our lives, particularly from birth through adolescence. Indeed, it must undergo more development after birth than does the brain of nearly any other species. Our brains are shaped substantially by the context in which they develop. They need all kinds of stimulation and social support to develop optimally. We are very social creatures. For example, we see social relationships even in inanimate objects; babies can demonstrate a preference for characters who are nice as compared to ones who are mean; and we act like the people around us. Although humans are competitive and individualistic much of the time, we spend quite a bit of our lives co-operating for the good of the group. This has allowed human populations to thrive across the planet and to build civilisations — feats that individuals, no matter how fit, could never pull off in isolation. Eagleman’s infectious optimism and enthusiasm do much to make up for the reservations I’ve just expressed. They also let him get away with a certain amount of bold exaggeration. Early on in the book for instance, he tells us that instead of experiencing the outside world directly ourselves, we only experience a fabricated model of reality, one seamlessly and instantly assembled by the brain for our sensory benefit. The real world, he says, is ‘colourless, odourless, tasteless and silent’ and the brain must work overtime to compensate for this barren environment by interpreting the various photons, air compression waves, molecular concentrations, pressure, texture and temperature signals it receives into a meaningful representation of external reality. So far, so good, but Eagleman gives insufficient credit to the brain for the superb job it does. All the incoming signals just mentioned are also an integral part of reality and, far from being somewhat of an illusion or a mere ‘show’, the impression of reality the brain puts together is a remarkably, accurate, dependable and consistent one – indeed, it cannot be otherwise because were this the case we would have utterly failed to successfully manage our environment and evolve as a species. It’s certainly no accident that six expert water colourists, for instance, painting exactly the same scene simultaneously from the same position, will record almost exactly the same visual impression – so much for the notion they individually make much of it up in their heads! I understand the need to write a book for a lay audience, I really do. The unfortunate part is that much of what Eagleman presents in the book is just simply wrong and not supported by any real science. Early in the "book" he talks about how memories are stored as function connections between neurons. He alludes that the reason our memories are not entirely accurate is that the neurons have a limited number of connections and have to be adaptable. This is pure speculative fiction. Sure, this could be the truth, but there is no actual research that says this. It is unknown how memories are stored in the brain or why they are so labile. To present this interpretation as a FACT is not responsible.

So what is reality? It’s like a television show that only you can see, and you can’t turn it off. The good news is that it happens to be broadcasting the most interesting show you could ask for: edited, personalized, and presented just for you. Our thoughts and our dreams, our memories and experiences all arise from this strange neural material. Who we are is found within its intricate firing patterns of electrochemical pulses. When that activity stops, so do you. When that activity changes character, due to injury or drugs, you change character in step. Unlike any other part of your body, if you damage a small piece of the brain, who you are is likely to change radically. Traditionally we examine warfare and killings in the context of history, economics, politics; but for a complete picture, we need also to understand this as a neural phenomenon. It would normally feel unconscionable to murder your neighbour. So what suddenly allows hundreds or thousands of people to do exactly that? What is it about certain situations that short-circuits the normal social functioning of the brain? To understand something like violence or genocide, we need to drill down one step further, to dehumanisation. No one is having an experience of the objective reality that really exists; each creature perceives only what it has evolved to perceive.

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This mirroring sheds light on a strange fact: couples who are married for a long time begin to resemble each other, and the longer they’ve been married, the stronger the effect. Research suggests this is not simply because they adopt the same clothes or hairstyles but because they’ve been mirroring each other’s faces for so many years that their patterns of wrinkles start to look the same. Full of interesting facts spruced throughout the book. “As many as two million new connections, or synapses, are formed every second in an infant’s brain. By age two, a child has over one hundred trillion synapses, double the number an adult has.” Although neuroscience is my daily routine, I’m still in awe every time I hold a human brain. After you take into account its substantial weight (an adult brain weighs in at 3lb), its strange consistency (like firm jelly), and its wrinkled appearance (deep valleys carving a puffy landscape), what’s striking is the brain’s sheer physicality: this hunk of unremarkable stuff seems so at odds with the mental processes it creates.