The Brain: The Story of You

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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.

Our brain does a great job of filtering, editing and adapting the sensory input we obtain, so that we get a picture of reality that is censored, based on what we need to know for survival and what the brain already knows. When the curtain fell, I took both bears and carried them over to each watching baby. I held them up, indicating to the child to choose one of them to play with. Remarkably, as was found by the Yale researchers, almost all the babies chose the bear that was kind. 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. Goes over some of the keys components of the brain. “The scientists were particularly interested in a small area of the brain called the hippocampus – vital for memory, and, in particular, spatial memory.” Who's in Control? - Well, most of the time the conscious brain isn't. Most of the time, we are on autopilot: allowing the conscious part of the brain free to take the really big decisions. Just think about the things you do automatically without thinking about them at all - like taking a bath in the morning or driving to work. The complex levels of sensory and motor co-ordination required for these tasks are handled at underneath the hood (so to speak).A good description of the teen’s brain. “Beyond social awkwardness and emotional hypersensitivity, the teen brain is set up to take risks.” 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. Actually, grouping together is advantageous from the evolutionary point of view. But the flip side is that the "ingroups" creates "outgroups" out of necessity (a fact that Desmond Morris has also touched upon, in The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Study of the Urban Animal) and this is the beginning of conflict. And outgroups can be objectified and dehumanised through propaganda - in the worst case, leading to genocide.

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"? 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. 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 totally elusive. Why? Because the holy grail of neurological research – getting to grips with the brain’s internal software, no less – has yet to be achieved. 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 bonnet, 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. No one is having an experience of the objective reality that really exists; each creature perceives only what it has evolved to perceive. 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.”

NEWSLETTER

An interesting look at willpower. “…willpower isn’t something that we just exercise – it’s something we deplete.” Equipped with an understanding of how human brains actually make decisions, we can develop new approaches beyond punishment. As we come to better appreciate the operations inside our brains, we can better align our behavior with our best intentions... Although societies possess deeply ingrained impulses for punishment, a different kind of criminal justice system – one with a closer relationship to the neuroscience of decisions – can be imagined. Such a legal system wouldn’t let anyone off the hook, but it would be more concerned with how to deal with law breakers with an eye toward their future rather than writing them off because of their past. 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. 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.