The Brain: The Story of You

by David Eagleman

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.

How does this work? There’s a tiny, ancient system in the brain whose mission is to keep updating your assessments of the world. This system is made of tiny groups of cells in your midbrain that speak in the language of a neurotransmitter called dopamine.

The dopamine acts as an error corrector: a chemical appraiser that always works to make your appraisals as updated as they can be. That way, you can prioritize your decisions based on your optimized guesses about the future.

In this age of digital hyperlinking, it’s more important than ever to understand the links between humans. Human brains are fundamentally wired to interact: we’re a splendidly social species. Although our social drives can sometimes be manipulated, they also sit squarely at the center of the human success story. You might assume that you end at the border of your skin, but there’s a sense in which there’s no way to mark the end of you and the beginning of all those around you. Your neurons and those of everyone on the planet interplay in a giant, shifting super-organism.

Although this sounds like science fiction, we’re not far off from this future – all thanks to the brain’s talent at extracting patterns, even when we’re not trying. That is the trick that can allow us to absorb complex data and incorporate it into our sensory experience of the world. Like reading this page, absorbing new data streams will come to feel effortless. Unlike reading, however, sensory addition would be a way to take on new information about the world without having to consciously attend to it. At the moment, we don’t know the limits – or if there are limits – to the kinds of data the brain can incorporate. But it’s clear that we are no longer a natural species that has to wait for sensory adaptations on an evolutionary timescale. As we move into the future, we will increasingly design our own sensory portals on the world. We will wire ourselves into an expanded sensory reality.

The Human Brain Project is an ambitious research mission that collects data from neuroscience laboratories across the globe – this includes data on individual cells (their contents and structure) to connectome data to information about large-scale activity patterns in groups of neurons.

The goal of the Human Brain Project is to achieve a simulation of a brain that uses detailed neurons, realistic in their structure and their behavior. Even with this ambitious goal and over a billion euros of funding from the European Union, the human brain is still totally out of reach. The current goal is to build a simulation of a rat brain.

“Instead of trying to produce a program to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s?” – Alan Turing, 1950. There are twenty-nine identical iCubs in research labs all over the globe, each one part of a common platform that can merge their learning.

With every attempt to simulate or create a human-like intelligence, we’re confronted by a central unsolved question of neuroscience: how does something as rich as the subjective feeling of being me – the sting of pain, the redness of red, the taste of grapefruit – arise from billions of simple brain cells running through their operations? After all, each brain cell is just a cell, following local rules, running its basic operations. By itself, it can’t do much. So how do billions of these add up to the subjective experience of being me?

When enough ants come together, a super-organism emerges – with collective properties that are more sophisticated than its basic parts. This phenomenon, known as “emergence”, is what happens when simple units interact in the right ways and something larger arises.