The Brain: The Story of You

by David Eagleman

Nelson explains that he’d walk into a room and be surrounded by little kids he’d never seen before – and they’d want to jump into his arms and sit on his lap or hold his hand or walk off with him. Although this sort of indiscriminate behavior seems sweet at first glance, it’s a coping strategy of neglected children, and it goes hand-in-hand with long-term attachment issues. It is a hallmark behavior of children who have grown up in an institution.

Without an environment with emotional care and cognitive stimulation, the human brain cannot develop normally.

Because of the wire-on-the-fly strategy of the human brain, who we are depends heavily on where we’ve been.

medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). This region becomes active when you think about your self – and especially the emotional significance of a situation to your self.

Due to changes in many brain areas involved in reward, planning, and motivation, our sense of self undergoes major changes in our teenage years.

hippocampus – vital for memory, and, in particular, spatial memory.

amygdala, which is involved in fear and aggression.

cells that fire together, wire together.

Think of the brain like a toolbox. If it’s a good toolbox, it will contain all the tools you need to get a job done. If you need to disengage a bolt, you might fish out a ratchet; if you don’t have access to the ratchet, you’ll pull out a wrench; if the wrench is missing you might try a pair of pliers. It’s the same concept in a cognitively fit brain: even if many pathways degenerate because of disease, the brain can retrieve other solutions.

Even when brains are unanchored from external data, they continue to generate their own imagery. Remove the world and the show still goes on.

proprioception.

Oxytocin increased bonding to their partner.

Sensory substitution is great for circumventing broken sensory systems

the internet is streaming petabytes of interesting data, but currently we can only access that information by staring at a phone or computer screen. What if you could have real-time data streamed into your body, so that it became part of your direct experience of the world? In other words, what if you could feel data?

computational hypothesis

Chinese Room Argument.

Searle argued this is just what is happening inside a computer. No matter how intelligent a program like iCub seems to be, it’s only following sets of instructions to spit out answers – manipulating symbols without ever really understanding what it’s doing.

Imagine a large mill. If you were to walk around inside of it, you would see its cogs and struts and levers all moving, but it would be preposterous to suggest that the mill is thinking or feeling or perceiving. How could a mill fall in love or enjoy a sunset? A mill is just made of pieces and parts. And so it is with the brain, Leibniz asserted. If you could expand the brain to the size of a mill and stroll around inside it, you would only see pieces and parts. Nothing would obviously correspond to perception. Everything would simply be acting on everything else. If you wrote down every interaction, it wouldn’t be obvious where thinking and feeling and perceiving reside.