The Brain: The Story of You

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David Eagleman's wide-ranging roundup of the current state of knowledge about the brain is concise, accessible and often very surprising. It's a strange new world inside your head." Within about seven years every atom in your body will be replaced by other atoms. Physically, you are constantly a new you. Fortunately, there may be one constant that links all these different versions of your self together: memory. Eagleman gets the writing here off to a great start, with a well-written intro. He's got an excellent writing style that is both interesting and engaging. The book is very readable.

Who Will We Be? - Now it's time for speculation - plug and play devices into the brain to take care of handicaps; sensory augmentation; keeping the brain in suspended animation; uploading one's consciousness into a computer; artificial intelligence... science fiction? Maybe. Like space travel was science fiction once upon a time. Research is ongoing in all these areas, with exciting possibilities opening up every day. There are also many pictures, illustrations, charts, and other supplemental visual aids interspliced within the writing here. Points awarded, as this provides some great additional context to the material covered. I've shared just a few of them here. Our brains make social judgments constantly. But do we learn this skill or are we born with it? To find out, one can investigate whether babies have it. Reproducing an experiment from psychologists Kiley Hamlin, Karen Wynn and Paul Bloom at Yale University, I invited babies, one at a time, to a puppet show. These babies were less than a year old, just beginning to explore the world around them. They were positioned on their mothers’ laps to watch the show.Now coming to the ghost in the machine - what is the self? Is it only the electrical impulses generated in the hardware of the brain? But even the brain is not unchanging: Although humans are competitive and individualistic much of the time, we spend quite a bit of our lives co-operating for the good of the group. This has allowed human populations to thrive across the planet and to build civilisations — feats that individuals, no matter how fit, could never pull off in isolation.

This ranks as the most fascinating and unsettling science series of the year, setting out the state of contemporary research into the human brain in terms that any interested layperson can comprehend.” – OC Register 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). 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. Author David Eagleman is an American neuroscientist, writer, and science communicator. He teaches neuroscience at Stanford University and is CEO and co-founder of Neosensory, a company that develops devices for sensory substitution.

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Eagleman’s writing style is easy on the “brain”. His goal is to educate the general public and he succeeds. Harris showed volunteers photographs of people from different social groups, for example, homeless people, or drug addicts. And he found that the mPFC was less active when they looked at a homeless person. It’s as though the person was more like an object. 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.” Why do we mirror? Does it serve a purpose? To find out, I invited a second group of people to the lab — all of whom had been exposed to the most lethal toxin on the planet. This is the Botulinum toxin, derived from a bacterium, and it’s commonly marketed under the brand name Botox. When injected into facial muscles, it paralyses them and thereby reduces wrinkling.

The show and its companion book by Eagleman, “The Brain: The Story of You,” are testaments to the neuroscientist’s fervent belief in the relevance of his field to ordinary people.” – NY Magazine Lasana Harris of the University of Leiden in Holland has conducted a series of experiments that move closer to understanding how this happens. Harris is looking for changes in the brain’s social network, in particular the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). This region becomes active when we’re interacting with, or thinking about, other people — but it’s not active when we’re dealing with inanimate objects, such as a coffee mug. As we grow, our social challenges become more subtle and complex. Beyond words and actions, we have to interpret inflection, facial expressions, body language. While we are consciously concentrating on what we are discussing, our brain machinery is busy processing complex information. These operations are so instinctive, they’re essentially invisible. But in every moment of our lives, our brain circuitry is decoding the emotions of others based on extremely subtle facial cues. Bu kitab düşüncələrimi dəyişdi. Artıq öz atdığım addımlara, düşüncələrimə, duyğularıma, hər bir kiçicik bədən hərəkətlərimə diqqət yetirməyə və əslində beynimizin necə mürəkkəb və möhtəşəm bir üzvümüz olduğunu anlamağa başlayıram.The Brain: The Story of You will be of great interest for those seeking to understanding the human brain and how it makes us who we are. It would normally feel unconscionable to murder your neighbour. So what suddenly allows hundreds or thousands of people to do exactly that? The Brain was an exceptional short presentation. I will most definitely be reading more from this author in the future. The book is the perfect example of science effectively communicated.

Kitabı çox bəyəndim❤yazar beynimizlə bağlı bir çox maraqlı məqama toxunaraq, başqa problemlər üçün də həll yollarını göstərmiş, yaxud bu yolda gedən prosesləri izah etmişdir. Our perception of reality, ourselves and people around us are nothing but electrochemical cell signals getting generated in our brain. Neurons getting fired up whenever we feel or experience anything. The world that we perceive as reality is nothing but a picture getting created inside brain based on sensory inputs. Neuroscientist David Eagleman argues that the brain is like a field of battle: subject to conflicting drives and impulses that we are only just beginning to understand. He talks to Sally Davies, FT Weekend’s digital editor, about the nature of consciousness, why human beings are hardwired for xenophobia, and how technology can extend our cognitive powers.

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Genocide is only possible when dehumanization happens on a massive scale, and the perfect tool for this job is propaganda: it keys right into the neural networks that understand other people, and dials down the degree to which we empathize with them. Considers important philosophical questions. Does the idea of an immaterial soul reconcile with neuroscientific evidence? Find out.