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David Eagleman -
Brain
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The brain is a complex system, but that doesn't mean it's incomprehensible. Our neural circuits were carved by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary history. Your brain has been molded by evolutionary pressures just as your spleen and eyes have been. And so has your consciousness. Consciousness developed because it was advantageous, but advantageous only in limited amounts.
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Societies would _not_ be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance - a teaming up of the internal rivals - is optimal for brains.... Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection in human brains.
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Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles.
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If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them.
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If you measure someone's brain and see very little activity during a task, it does not necessarily indicate that they're not trying - it more likely signifies that they have worked hard in the past to burn the programs into the circuitry. Consciousness is called in during the first phase of learning and is excluded from the game playing after it is deep in the system.
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Reductionism is not the right viewpoint for everything, and it certainly won't explain the relationship between the brain and the mind. This is because of a feature known as emergence. When you put together large numbers of pieces and parts, the whole can become something greater than the sum.
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Consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain.
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When one part of the brain makes a choice, other parts can quickly invent a story to explain why. If you show the command "Walk" to the right hemisphere (the one without language), the patient will get up and start walking. If you stop him and ask why he's leaving, his left hemisphere, cooking up an answer, will say something like "I was going to get a drink of water."
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Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia - hundreds of billions of them. Each one of these cells is as complicated as a city.
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The continuous networks of neural circuitry accomplish their functions using multiple, independently discovered strategies. The brain lends itself well to the complexity of the world, but poorly to clear-cut cartography.
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Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the combined output would be blinding.
David Eagleman
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Quote of the day
True, the initial ideas are in general those of an individual, but the establishment of the reality and truth is in general the work of more than one person.
Willard Libby
David Eagleman
Born:
April 25, 1971
(age 53)
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