The Brain: The Story of You

by David Eagleman

we’re so trapped inside our reality that it is inordinately difficult to realize we’re trapped inside anything.

Your brain is a relentless shape-shifter, constantly rewriting its own circuitry – and because your experiences are unique, so are the vast, detailed patterns in your neural networks. Because they continue to change your whole life, your identity is a moving target; it never reaches an endpoint.

the blooming of new connections is supplanted by a strategy of neural “pruning”. As you mature, 50% of your synapses will be pared back.

Which synapses stay and which go? When a synapse successfully participates in a circuit, it is strengthened; in contrast, synapses weaken if they aren’t useful, and eventually they are eliminated. Just like paths in a forest, you lose the connections that you don’t use.

You become who you are not because of what grows in your brain, but because of what is removed.

mature pleasure-seeking system coupled with an immature orbitofrontal cortex means that teens are not only emotionally hypersensitive, but also less able to control their emotions than adults.

Particular kinds of epilepsy make people more religious. Parkinson’s disease often makes people lose their faith, while the medication for Parkinson’s can often turn people into compulsive gamblers.

Rather than memory being an accurate video recording of a moment in your life, it is a fragile brain state from a bygone time that must be resurrected for you to remember.

Our past is not a faithful record. Instead it’s a reconstruction, and sometimes it can border on mythology.

Keeping a busy lifestyle into old age benefits the brain.

they found that negative psychological factors like loneliness, anxiety, depression, and proneness to psychological distress were related to more rapid cognitive decline. Positive traits like conscientiousness, purpose in life, and keeping busy were protective.

You don’t perceive objects as they are. You perceive them as you are.

Outside your brain, there is just energy and matter. Over millions of years of evolution the human brain has become adept at turning this energy and matter into a rich sensory experience of being in the world.

at any moment, what we experience as seeing relies less on the light streaming into our eyes, and more on what’s already inside our heads.

conscious experience is really just immediate memory.

Conscious thought burns energy.

I’m using general-purpose cognitive software; he’s transferred the skill into specialized cognitive hardware.

Practiced skills become written into the micro-structure of the brain.

an interesting upshot to automatized skills: attempts to consciously interfere with them typically worsen their performance.

During flow, the brain enters a state of hypofrontality, meaning that parts of the prefrontal cortex temporarily become less active. These are areas involved in abstract thinking, planning into the future, and concentrating on one’s sense of self.

gently guiding the unconscious brain has a far more powerful influence on our decision making than outright enforcement ever can.

Consciousness gets involved when the unexpected happens, when we need to work out what to do next.

our lives are steered by forces far beyond our capacity for awareness or control.

even when we think we’re being single-minded, our actions are the product of immense battles that continually rise and fall in the darkness of the cranium.

each choice is marked by a bodily signature. And that helps you to decide.

Social pain – such as that resulting from exclusion – activates the same brain regions as physical pain.

evolution doesn’t need to continually redesign the brain, just the peripherals, and the brain figures out how to utilize them.