As we age, our brain figures out a set of rules, which the author lays out in his conclusion. “All it ever sees are electrochemical signals that stream in along different data cables,” writes the author, but it works brilliantly to extract patterns from this input. What’s happening? The brain does not think or hear or touch anything. In the first of many delightful educational jolts, he notes that the mature brain contains regions with specific functions, but under magnification, its billions of nerve cells, which form trillions of connections, look the same. With this introduction, Eagleman is off and running. “For humans at birth,” writes the author, “the brain is remarkably unfinished, and interaction with the world is necessary to complete it.” Unlike an arm or stomach, the brain is a dynamic system, a general-purpose computing device that changes in response to experience. Credit goes to the human brain, entirely the creation of DNA at birth but unfinished. A caveman with identical DNA might look like us, but their actions and thoughts would be utterly foreign. Every animal today possesses DNA identical to that of 30,000 years ago, and its behavior is also indistinguishable. A masterful update on how the brain operates.Īt the beginning, neuroscientist Eagleman notes how DNA gets all the credit for being the basis of life but deserves only half.
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