The Brain: The Story of You

by David Eagleman

The pain matrix is the name given to a set of areas that become active when you are in pain. Most of these areas also become active when you watch someone else in pain.

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

One of the most important things we learn as humans is perspective taking. And children don’t typically get a meaningful exercise in that. When one is forced to understand what it’s like to stand in someone else’s shoes, it opens up new cognitive pathways.

Education plays a key role in preventing genocide. Only by understanding the neural drive to form ingroups and outgroups – and the standard tricks by which propaganda plugs into this drive – can we hope to interrupt the paths of dehumanization that end in mass atrocity.

Everywhere you look you can find systems with emergent properties. No single hunk of metal on an airplane has the property of flight, but when you arrange the pieces in the right way, flight emerges. Pieces and parts of a system can be individually quite simple. It’s all about their interaction. In many cases, the parts themselves are replaceable.

In his framework, Tononi suggests that a conscious system requires a perfect balance of enough complexity to represent very different states (this is called differentiation) and enough connectivity to have distant parts of the network be in tight communication with one another (called integration).