The Brain: The Story of You

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Each of us is on our own trajectory – steered by our genes and our experiences – and as a result every brain has a different internal life. Brains are as unique as snowflakes. PDF / EPUB File Name: Brain___The_Story_of_You_9781101870549_-_David_Eagleman.pdf, Brain___The_Story_of_You_9781101870549_-_David_Eagleman.epub A fascinating look at Syndrome E and its repercussions. “Syndrome E is characterized by a diminished emotional reactivity, which allows repetitive acts of violence.” “Genocide is only possible when dehumanization happens on a massive scale, and the perfect tool for this job is propaganda.” This area is so highly speculative that there is almost no research that sheds light on it, but I can understand how the producers of the program thought this would be a good hook for people who wonder about the Singularity. Writing a popular science book (I won't use the abhorrent term "pop science") is a dicey affair. If it becomes too scientific, it is not likely to be popular; but if it dumbs the science down too much, it tends not to be taken seriously by discerning readers. So the writer of such a tome has a tough time, striking exactly the right note - that is why very few people succeed in this field. David Eagleman is one such, and this book is gem.

As we grow, our social challenges become more subtle and complex. Beyond words and actions, we have to interpret inflection, facial expressions, body language. While we are consciously concentrating on what we are discussing, our brain machinery is busy processing complex information. These operations are so instinctive, they’re essentially invisible. But in every moment of our lives, our brain circuitry is decoding the emotions of others based on extremely subtle facial cues. An interesting look at willpower. “…willpower isn’t something that we just exercise – it’s something we deplete.” Why do we mirror? Does it serve a purpose? To find out, I invited a second group of people to the lab — all of whom had been exposed to the most lethal toxin on the planet. This is the Botulinum toxin, derived from a bacterium, and it’s commonly marketed under the brand name Botox. When injected into facial muscles, it paralyses them and thereby reduces wrinkling. A good description of the teen’s brain. “Beyond social awkwardness and emotional hypersensitivity, the teen brain is set up to take risks.”

A magical, mystical tour of the brain showing how life shapes your brain and your brain shapes your life.” – Parade 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. A look at the future of neuroscience. “The secret to understanding our success – and our future opportunity – is the brain’s tremendous ability to adjust, known as brain plasticity.” Our perception of reality, ourselves and people around us are nothing but electrochemical cell signals getting generated in our brain. Neurons getting fired up whenever we feel or experience anything. The world that we perceive as reality is nothing but a picture getting created inside brain based on sensory inputs. 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.

This understanding is critical to understanding our history. All across the globe, groups of people repeatedly inflict violence on other groups, even those that pose no direct threat. The year 1915 saw the systematic killing of more than a million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks. In 1994, over a period of 100 days, the Hutus in Rwanda killed 800,000 Tutsis, mostly with machetes.Having read Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by the author (a quirky look at possible after-death scenarios - nothing to do with science!), I knew Eagleman was a gifted writer. It seems that he is a neuroscientist as well. And when two such talents combine in one person, a book like this is what we get. The 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. All the experiences in your life – from single conversations to your broader culture – shape the microscopic details of your brain..." When people watched this short film and were asked to describe what they saw, you might expect that they described simple shapes moving around. After all, it’s just a circle and two triangles changing co-ordinates. But that’s not what the viewers reported. They described a love story, a fight, a chase, a victory. Heider and Simmel used this animation to demonstrate how readily we perceive social intention all around us.

A look at social neuroscience. “Our social skills are deeply rooted in our neural circuitry – and understanding this circuitry is the basis of a young field of study called social neuroscience.” So are we the sum total of our memories? But memory gets constantly faded, renewed, replaced and even falsified; so does that mean our self-awareness is also "false"? 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. The Brain was an exceptional short presentation. I will most definitely be reading more from this author in the future. The book is the perfect example of science effectively communicated. Despite all this very impressive progress which Eagleman dutifully records, it has to be pointed out that neuroscience has so far achieved only a very limited understanding of how the brain actually works. Neural correlation especially has enabled a very thorough identification of areas responsible for a wide range of human behaviour, psychological as well as bodily. But whereas we now know much of what the brain does and where within itself it does what it does, neuroscience has yet to account for how it does what it does, an explanation for consciousness, the ‘hard problem’ par excellence, remaining particularly elusive. Why? Because the holy grail of neurological research – getting to grips with the brain’s internal software, no less – has yet to be realized. In these circumstances, it’s perhaps little exaggeration to say that its practitioners can be likened in some ways to a band of stone age people who, suddenly finding an abandoned car in the desert with the key still in the ignition, start playing with the dashboard controls, pressing switches, turning knobs and pulling levers, carefully noting as they do so that various lights come on and certain engine noises can be heard, some of which dim or stop when, after popping the hood, they yank out the odd cable, unscrew a few caps or drain a fluid reservoir. Do they have a clue about internal combustion, let alone electricity? No way.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 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.” Eagleman’s writing style is easy on the “brain”. His goal is to educate the general public and he succeeds. Our drive to come together into groups yields a survival advantage — but it has a dark side. For every in-group, there must exist at least one outgroup 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.

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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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 ‘colorless, odorless, 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 colorists, 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! 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