The Brain: The Story of You

Product Information

Eagleman’s infectious optimism and enthusiasm do much to make up for the reservations I’ve just expressed. They also let him get away with a certain amount of bold exaggeration. Early on in the book for instance, he tells us that instead of experiencing the outside world directly ourselves, we only experience a fabricated model of reality, one seamlessly and instantly assembled by the brain for our sensory benefit. The real world, he says, is ‘colourless, odourless, tasteless and silent’ and the brain must work overtime to compensate for this barren environment by interpreting the various photons, air compression waves, molecular concentrations, pressure, texture and temperature signals it receives into a meaningful representation of external reality. So far, so good, but Eagleman gives insufficient credit to the brain for the superb job it does. All the incoming signals just mentioned are also an integral part of reality and, far from being somewhat of an illusion or a mere ‘show’, the impression of reality the brain puts together is a remarkably, accurate, dependable and consistent one – indeed, it cannot be otherwise because were this the case we would have utterly failed to successfully manage our environment and evolve as a species. It’s certainly no accident that six expert water colourists, for instance, painting exactly the same scene simultaneously from the same position, will record almost exactly the same visual impression – so much for the notion they individually make much of it up in their heads!

The London cab drivers test; “Knowledge of London,” or "The Knowledge." Plasticity; hippocampal change. It would normally feel unconscionable to murder your neighbour. So what suddenly allows hundreds or thousands of people to do exactly that? Consider how different the following items are: bunnies, trains, monsters, airplanes and children’s toys. As different as they are, these can all be the main characters in popular animated films and we have no difficulty in assigning intentions to them. A viewer’s brain needs very few hints to take on the assumption that these characters are like us. Equipped with an understanding of how human brains actually make decisions, we can develop new approaches beyond punishment. As we come to better appreciate the operations inside our brains, we can better align our behavior with our best intentions... Although societies possess deeply ingrained impulses for punishment, a different kind of criminal justice system – one with a closer relationship to the neuroscience of decisions – can be imagined. Such a legal system wouldn’t let anyone off the hook, but it would be more concerned with how to deal with law breakers with an eye toward their future rather than writing them off because of their past.Couples married for a long time begin to resemble each other. The longer they’ve been married, the stronger the effect

Despite all this very impressive progress which Eagleman dutifully records, it has to be pointed out that neuroscience has so far achieved only a very limited understanding of how the brain actually works. Neural correlation especially has enabled a very thorough identification of areas responsible for a wide range of human behaviour, psychological as well as bodily. But whereas we now know much of what the brain does and where within itself it does what it does, neuroscience has yet to account for how it does what it does, an explanation for consciousness, the ‘hard problem’ par excellence, remaining totally elusive. Why? Because the holy grail of neurological research – getting to grips with the brain’s internal software, no less – has yet to be achieved. In these circumstances, it’s perhaps little exaggeration to say that its practitioners can be likened in some ways to a band of stone age people who, suddenly finding an abandoned car in the desert with the key still in the ignition, start playing with the dashboard controls, pressing switches, turning knobs and pulling levers, carefully noting as they do so that various lights come on and certain engine noises can be heard, some of which dim or stop when, after popping the bonnet, they yank out the odd cable, unscrew a few caps or drain a fluid reservoir. Do they have a clue about internal combustion, let alone electricity? No way.As Harris puts it, by shutting down the systems that see the homeless person as a fellow human, one doesn’t have to experience the unpleasant pressures of feeling bad about not giving money. In other words, the homeless have become dehumanised: the brain is viewing them more like objects and less like people. As Harris explains: “If you don’t properly diagnose people as human beings, then the moral rules that are reserved for human people may not apply.” The author leaves the troublesome question of free will unresolved - apparently the jury is still out on that one.) This understanding is critical to understanding our history. All across the globe, groups of people repeatedly inflict violence on other groups, even those that pose no direct threat. The year 1915 saw the systematic killing of more than a million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks. In 1994, over a period of 100 days, the Hutus in Rwanda killed 800,000 Tutsis, mostly with machetes.