David Eagleman

The Brain

My top 25 takeaways:

  1. The lack of preparedness during birth (as compared to animals) seems like a disadvantage for us since (e.g.) baby giraffes can learn to stand on its feet in a few hours. But this is the reason we are the rulers of this planet: animals have a preprogrammed brain but the human brain can be formed by life experiences, so that it can develop perfectly well in different environments, from the icy tundra to the noisy urban centers.
  2. Our brains are shaped substantially by the context in which they develop. Neurally speaking, who you are depends on where you’ve been.
  3. Our brains need all kinds of stimulation and social support to develop optimally. This is why the first 2 years of life are very important for the healthy development of children.
  4. It’s not just illness or chemicals that change us: from the movies we watch to the jobs we work; everything contributes to a continual reshaping of the neural networks we summarize as us.
  5. Our perception of reality has less to do with what’s happening out there, and more to do with what’s happening inside our brain. The world around you, with its rich colors, textures, sounds, and scents is an illusion, is a show put on for you by your brain. If you could perceive reality as it is, you would be shocked by its colorless, odorless, tasteless silence. Outside your brain, there is just energy and matter.
  6. The slice of reality that we can see is limited by our biology. Reality is a narrative played in the sealed auditorium of the cranium.
  7. The conscious you is only the smallest part of the activity of your brain. Your actions, your beliefs and your biases are all driven by networks in your brain to which you have no conscious access.
  8. Our subconscious mind controlling us is not as unsettling as it might sound. In fact, it’s vital to functioning normally. Imagine having a conversation or drinking a cup of coffee if you had to focus on every minute movement those activities involve.
  9. When you reach a certain level of proficiency, conscious effort leads to mistakes. Baseball players hit the ball without consciously making a decision to do so. That’s just as well, because the human brain isn’t fast enough to accurately gauge the speed of the incoming ball and decide when to swing the bat.
  10. You’re more likely to think of someone’s behavior as immoral if there’s a bad smell in the air. If you’re holding a warm drink in your hand, you’re more likely to describe your relationships with others warmly. This is called priming, meaning that sensory data influences our perceptions even when we’re not aware of it.
  11. Consciousness gets involved when the unexpected happens, when we need to work out what to do next.
  12. The key business of brains is to predict. And to do this reasonably well, we need to continually learn about the world from our every experience.
  13. A two-year-old child has the same number of brain cells but twice as many synapses – connections which transmit information – as an adult. This is because, as humans age, they lose the synaptic connections that haven’t been reinforced by constant repetition.
  14. The brain doesn’t like waiting for an imagined future. Immediate rewards trump hypothetical long-term payoffs. That’s why people take out low-interest loans that they’re unable to repay and why married people have affairs they later regret.
  15. So how do you stave off temptation and play the long game? One way is to sign a “Ulysses Contract”. Say you want to stick to your new workout schedule. Bind yourself to an agreement to meet your friend at the gym. If you want to steer clear of Facebook during exams, have a friend change your password.
  16. In order to do the right things and stay on course, we use willpower. But it diminishes after a long, tiring day of working. Willpower is not just a thing we can exercise, but also a resource we consume. To make good decisions we must be conscious about when this happens and try to replenish ourselves with energy to keep making the right choices.
  17. Socialization is one of the brain’s main functions and it boosts the chance of group survival.
  18. Being empathetic revolves around mirroring. If you mirror another’s behaviors or facial expressions, our brains begin to understand what they are feeling.
  19. 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.
  20. If you were a robot, you could stay stuck for a long time trying to compute the best decision. But humans have an extra review offered to us by our body: maybe our palms are a bit sweaty after thinking about our budget, or you salivate when you are trying to remember the last time you had that kind of soup. This body experience is what allows the brain to quickly provide a value for soup A and soup B.
  21. If you enjoy the decision you make, your brain releases dopamine and next time you are faced with a similar decision, your brain will remember that good feeling.
  22. Cognitive exercises that keep the brain active like crosswords, reading, driving, learning new abilities, taking responsibilities, social interactions and physical activities have a protection role. Ditto for practicing being conscious, meditating, having a life goal and an active life. Loneliness, anxiety and depression are associated with rapid cognitive decline.
  23. If you move a camera and try to record a video in the same way your eyes are moving, you will get a bad recording. So why does the world seem stable when we look at it? Because our internal model works based on the assumption that the external world is stable.
  24. One amazing discovery is that the brain can adapt to non-biological devices. Cochlear implants are an example of this. The electronic device sends a digital signal to the brain and the brain ‘hears’ it. The signal on its own has no meaning, but in combination with the brain results in hearing.
  25. Not only is it possible to implant false new memories in the brain, but people embrace and embellish them, unknowingly weaving fantasy into the fabric of their identity. Also, the enemy of memory isn’t time; it’s other memories.

Written by: binod shankar

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