Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly, I awoke, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming that I am a man.” The” Eagleman has a talent for testing the untestable, for taking seemingly sophomoric notions and using them to nail down the slippery stuff of consciousness."

BBC Four - The Brain with David Eagleman BBC Four - The Brain with David Eagleman

Despite the feeling that we’re directly experiencing the world out there, our reality is ultimately built in the dark, in a foreign language of electrochemical signals. The activity churning across vast neural networks gets turned into your story of this, your private experience of the world: the feeling of this book in your hands, the light in the room, the smell of roses, the sound of others speaking.” A look at social neuroscience. “Our social skills are deeply rooted in our neural circuitry – and understanding this circuitry is the basis of a young field of study called social neuroscience.” 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. 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. I think of consciousness as the CEO of a large sprawling corporation, with many thousands of subdivisions and departments all collaborating and interacting and competing in different ways. Small companies don’t need a CEO – but when an organization reaches sufficient size and complexity, it needs a CEO to stay above the daily details and to craft the long-view of the company.So strap in for a whistle-stop tour into the inner cosmos. In the infinitely dense tangle of billions of brain cells and their trillions of connections, I hope you’ll be able to squint and make out something that you might not have expected to see in there. You. No one is having an experience of the objective reality that really exists; each creature perceives only what it has evolved to perceive. Even before they can walk or talk, babies have the tools to make judgments about others. The brain comes with inborn instincts to detect who’s trustworthy, and who isn’t

The Brain: The Story of You Download - OceanofPDF [PDF] [EPUB] The Brain: The Story of You Download - OceanofPDF

If biological algorithms are the important part of what makes us who we are, rather than the physical stuff, then it’s a possibility that we will someday be able to copy our brains, upload them, and live forever in silica. But there’s an important question here: is it really you? Not exactly. The uploaded copy has all your memories and believes it was you, just there, standing outside the computer, in your body. Here’s the strange part: if you die and we turn on the simulation one second later, it would be a transfer. It would be no different to beaming up in Star Trek, when a person is disintegrated, and then a new version is reconstituted a moment later. Uploading may not be all that different from what happens to you each night when you go to sleep: you experience a little death of your consciousness, and the person who wakes up on your pillow the next morning inherits all your memories, and believes him or herself to be you. Are” This mirroring sheds light on a strange fact: couples who are married for a long time begin to resemble each other, and the longer they’ve been married, the stronger the effect. Research suggests this is not simply because they adopt the same clothes or hairstyles but because they’ve been mirroring each other’s faces for so many years that their patterns of wrinkles start to look the same. 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." Full of interesting facts spruced throughout the book. “As many as two million new connections, or synapses, are formed every second in an infant’s brain. By age two, a child has over one hundred trillion synapses, double the number an adult has.”Traditionally we examine warfare and killings in the context of history, economics, politics; but for a complete picture, we need also to understand this as a neural phenomenon. It would normally feel unconscionable to murder your neighbour. So what suddenly allows hundreds or thousands of people to do exactly that? What is it about certain situations that short-circuits the normal social functioning of the brain? To understand something like violence or genocide, we need to drill down one step further, to dehumanisation. One thing in conclusion - my review contains only the bare bones of the book. I have left out the various real-world examples Eagleman uses to bolster his arguments, for fear of bloating it up. These examples are actually the most endearing part of the book. A good description of the teen’s brain. “Beyond social awkwardness and emotional hypersensitivity, the teen brain is set up to take risks.” So are we the sum total of our memories? But memory gets constantly faded, renewed, replaced and even falsified; so does that mean our self-awareness is also "false"? 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.