The Brain - The Story of You

As the name suggests, the book is focused on how the brain works, what the brain is capable of and how it influences and to what extent it controls us. There are topics and information in this book that might seem unbelievable and make you wonder whether you are really in control or just a puppet of your brain. These are the short notes I prepared from each chapter of the book.

Who am I?

• Who we are is found in the firing patterns of electrochemical pulses of the brain.
• When that activity changes character, due to injury or drugs, you change character in lockstep.
• If you damage even a small part of your brain, it can change you radically.

  Born Unfinished

• Unlike many other animals, humans are helpless at birth. We take a year to walk and maybe two years to articulate thoughts.
• Other animals become independent as soon as they are born. This may seem like an advantage, but the trade-off is flexibility. They have a prearranged brain and can’t adapt to conditions like we can.
• Our brain is LiveWIred

  ChildHood Pruning

• The flexibility of young brains is because a baby’s neurons are unconnected. In the first two years of life, they start connecting up rapidly.
• By age two, a child has over one hundred trillion synapses—double the number an adult has.
• Synapses that actively participate in a circuit stay, and those which are not useful are eliminated.

  Nature’s Gamble

• If a child is deprived of emotional care, support, and stimulation (not basic needs like being fed), they develop “indiscriminate friendliness” and might show signs of underdeveloped brains.
• A proper environment is really necessary for a child’s development. If left ignored in the earlier stages of their life, they develop differing levels of developmental problems.

  The Teen Years

• The process of building a human brain takes up around 25 years.
• The major change during the teen years is the emerging sense of self and, with itself, self-consciousness.
• Teens tend to be more anxious about self than adults. This is related to an area of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex(mPFC).
• The mPFC peaks at the age of 15. That is, during adolescence, self-evaluation is a high priority.
• Adults become accustomed to this feeling over the years.
• Just before puberty, The brain goes through a stage of overproduction, trimming weaker connections and reinforcing stronger ones. This reduces the volume of prefrontal cortex by 1%.
• Because these massive changes take place in brain areas required for higher reasoning and the control of urges, adolescence is a time of steep cognitive change.
• The teen brain is set up to take risks, but the obitofrontal cortex involved in decision making and attention is similar to that in children.
• Peer pressure strongly compels behavior in teens: areas involved in social considerations (such as the mPFC) are more strongly coupled to other brain regions that translate motivations into actions
• Who we are as a teenager is not simply the result of a choice or an attitude; it is the product of a period of intense and inevitable neural change.

  Plasticity in Adulthood

• By the time we are 25, Our brain appears to be fully developed. But the brain can still change with experiences and retains the change.
• When Albert Einstein’s brain was examined, The brain area devoted to his left fingers had expanded due to his lesser-known passion for playing the violin.

  Pathological Changes

• Can disease change our brain?
• On August 1st 1966, Charles Whitman fired and killed 25 people and was finally shot dead by the police. Upon later inspection, it was found that he had also killed his wife and mother the night before.
• He was an Eagle Scout, he was employed as a bank teller, and he was an engineering student.
• It was later discovered that he had a tumour in his head pressing against the Amygdala - which is involved in fear and aggression, resulting in him taking these actions.
• Parkinson’s disease often makes people lose their faith, while the medication for Parkinson’s can often turn people into compulsive gamblers.

  Am I The Sum of My Memories?

• Our bodies and brains are actively changing. Within about seven years every atom in your body will be replaced by other atoms.
• Your memory of who you were at fifteen is different to who you actually were at fifteen; moreover, you’ll have different memories that relate back to the same events.
• Your memory of an event can get muddied since there is only a finite number of neurons. The brain only remembers some key points from the event. But you may feel like you have the full picture. The present also influences your past memories.

  The Fallibility of Memory

• False memories can be implanted into a person. For this an experiment was conducted by Professor Elizabeth Loftus at University of California, Irvine where she told a made up story to the volunteers with plausible details from their pasts. Many claimed they could remember this happening. As time went by they claimed remembering more about this.
• Our past is not a faithful record. Instead it’s a reconstruction, and sometimes it can border on mythology. So if your answer to who you are is based simply on your memories, that makes your identity something of a strange, ongoing, mutable narrative.
• In the same way that your environment and behavior shape your brain when you’re younger, they are just as important in your later years.
• Page 28 has a great story

  I Am Sentient

• Your brain is active at night as much as during the day. During sleep, neurons simply coordinate with one another differently, entering a more synchronized, rhythmic state.
• Who you are depends on what your neurons are up to, moment by moment.

  Brains Are Like Snowflakes

• The meaning of something to you is all about your webs of associations.
• You don’t perceive objects as they are. You perceive them as you are.
• If a cloth with random color pigments is shown to you, It might not trigger memories or fire up your imagination. But when the pigments are rearranged to a national flag, It can trigger memories and imagination.
• As your trillions of new connections continually form and re-form, the distinctive pattern means that no one like you has ever existed, or will ever exist again. The experience of your conscious awareness, right now, is unique to you.
• And because the physical stuff is constantly changing, we are too. We’re not fixed. From cradle to grave, we are works in progress.

  What is reality?

  Outside your brain, there is just energy and matter. Over millions of years of evolution the human brain has become adept at turning this energy and matter into a rich sensory experience of being in the world. How?

  The Illusion of Reality

• The image appears to be moving even tho it is static.
• Illusions like these gives us the hint that our picture of external world is not very accurate.
• 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.

  Your Experience of Reality

• All sensory experiences are taking place in your brain like smelling, touching, hearing etc.
• The brain has no direct contact with outside world. It receives information from your sensory organs that convert information like temp,texture to electrical signals.
• Everything you experience – every sight, sound, smell – rather than being a direct experience, is an electrochemical rendition in a dark theater.

  I Was Blind But Now I See

• Mike May became blind at the age of three and half but he then went through a surgery 40 years later which restored his vision.
• When the bandages were removed he couldn’t understand what he was seeing. His brain was receiving information from his eyes but it didn’t know what to do with it. Mike couldn’t even tell what his children looked like.
• The lesson that surfaces from Mike’s experience is that the visual system is not like a camera. It’s not as though seeing is simply about removing the lens cap. For vision, you need more than functioning eyes.
• Mike’s visual cortex as taken over by his other senses like hearing and touch.
• One of neuroscience’s unsolved puzzles is known as the “binding problem”: how is the brain able to produce a single, unified picture of the world, given that vision is processed in one region, hearing in another, touch in another, and so on? While the problem is still unsolved, the common currency among neurons – as well as their massive interconnectivity – promises to be at the heart of the solution.

  Seeing Requires More Than The Eyes

• Movement of our bodies is required for developing proper vision.
• The signals coming into the brain can only be made sense of cross verifying it with our other senses. So to understand visual data we need to cross verify it with our motions.

  Vision Feels Effortless But It’s Not

• The sense of vision seems effortless but its not. To get more idea on this Dr. Alyssa Brewer conducted an experiment where they wore prism glasses which was inverted vision horizontally.
• She wasn’t able to locate objects. Her vision was saying something while her other senses were saying something else. It was like learning to see all over again.
• She reports that after wearing the goggles for days, people develop an internal sense of a new left and an old left and a new right and an old right. After a week they can move around normally.

  Synchronizing The Senses

• There is an issue of timing. The brain takes time to process the sensory data it receives. This can delay our reactions and movements.
• In a race, when the gun arm is fired, It takes time for the brain to process the auditory input. So the author decided to an experiment in which he used flash instead of the gun, Since light is faster than sound.
• But the reactions were slower when the flash was used. This is because visual data goes through more complex processing that auditory data.
• But when you clap your hands infront of a mirror, You can see that the sound and vision is synced. This is because what the brain serves as reality is a delayed version. It first takes in all the data and cooks up a story.

  When the senses are cut off, does the show stop?

• Our experience of reality is the brain’s ultimate construction.
• When all the senses are cut off, The reality doesn’t stop, it gets stranger.
• People in solitary confinement cut off from all sensory inputs describes seeing visions that seemed completely real.
• The brain actually predicts the reality before seeing it. This is known as internal model.
• The brain compares the predicted reality with the visual input and then reports on the differences.
• So when deprived of all sensory input, The brain can create it’s own reality.
• And if you want to experience this, You already do. The dreams you see at night, believing in it’s full reality.

  Seeing Our Expectations

• Instead of using your senses to constantly rebuild your reality from scratch every moment, you’re comparing sensory information with a model that the brain has already constructed.
• your eyes jump around about four times a second, in jerky movements called saccades. But the vision appears stable to you because your internal model assumes the world outside is stable.

  The Internal Model Is Low Resolution

• The brain doesn’t take in every detail you see. It just draws up an approximation as the internal model.
• An experiment was conducted it which people shown a painting and was later asked questions about it. They were able to answer general questions but when asked about the specifics, They couldn’t remember.
• The brain does this because it works as energy efficient as possible.

  Thin Slice of Reality

• Colors only exist inside out brain. We see colors because when electromagnetic radiation hits an object, some of it bounces off and is captured by our eyes. We can distinguish between millions of combinations of wavelengths – but it is only inside our heads that any of this becomes color.
• Color is an interpretation of wavelengths, one that only exists internally.
• Not only is there no color, there’s also no sound: the compression and expansion of air is picked up by the ears, and turned into electrical signals. The brain then presents these signals to us as mellifluous tones and swishes and clatters and jangles.
• Reality is also odorless: there’s no such thing as smell outside our brains. Molecules floating through the air bind to receptors in our nose and are interpreted as different smells by our brain.

  Your Reality, My Reality

• Hanna Bosley experiences colors when she looks at letters. For her J is purple and T is red. Similarly a color is associated with every letter. She has a perceptual experience known as synesthesia.
• Synesthesia is a condition in which senses (or in some cases concepts) are blended. There are many different kinds of synesthesia. Some taste words. Some see sounds as colors.

  Believing what our brains tell us

• People experiencing schizophrenic episode, it never struck to them that something is strange. Because they believes the narrative told by the sum of their brain chemistry.

  TimeWrap

• The way our brain experience time can also be strange. In some situations, Our reality runs more slowly or more quickly.
• The subjective experience of time slowing has been reported in a variety of life-threatening experiences.
• This is because in life threatening situations, The amygdala becomes active and takes command of the brain to deal with the situation. The memories are then laid out with far more details.
• The side effect is that, Your brain is not accustomed to this kind of density of memory, so when the events are replayed, the brain interprets it must have taken a long time.

  The StoryTeller

• So what is reality? It’s like a television show that only you can see, and you can’t turn it off. The good news is that it happens to be broadcasting the most interesting show you could ask for: edited, personalized, and presented just for you.

  Who's in Control?

  Consciousness

• When we read, Our brain is automatically deciphering the languages for us. We don’t have to put in the effort.

  The Unconscious Brain in Action

• Even a simple task of lifting a coffee cup and drinking it is complex but it is meticulously handled by the brain.
• Even tho there is complex activity going on in your brain, you conscious mind won’t notice it.
• Even with your eyes closed, You know the position of your limbs and arms. This capacity to know the state of your muscles is called proprioception.

  Burning skills

• When we practice new skills, we become physically hardwired. Some people tend to call this muscle memory, but it is in fact stored in our brain.
• A procedural memory is a long-term memory that represents how to do things automatically, like riding a bicycle or tying shoelaces.
• Through practice, repeated signals have been passed along neural networks, strengthening synapses and thereby burning the skill into the circuitry.
• As a skill becomes hardwired, it sinks below the level of conscious control. At that point, we can perform a task automatically and without thinking about it.
• In some cases, a skill is so hardwired that the circuitry underlying it is found below the brain, in the spinal cord.

  Running on autopilot

• Conscious interference with automated skills can worsen their performance.
• Atheletes usually enter a state of flow, where they give complete control to their unconscious brain.
• During flow, the brain enters a state of hypofrontality, meaning that parts of the prefrontal cortex temporarily become less active.
• Consider the case of baseball, the ball is travelling at really high speeds. The batter does’t connect with ball consciously. The ball simply travels too quickly for the athelete to be consciously aware of its position.

  The deep caverns of the unconscious

• You speak without even thinking about each words. Your brain is working behind this. Compare your speed when speaking in a foreign language. You might have to think about every word before speaking.
• We take credit for our ideas but our brain starts working on those ideas months before it rises to our awareness.
• Sigmand Freud on treatment of psychological disorders, observed that much of his patients had no idea what drove their behaviour.
• Effect Priming - one thing influences the perception of something else.For example, if you’re holding a warm drink you’ll describe your relationship with a family member more favorably; when you’re holding a cold drink, you’ll express a slightly poorer opinion of the relationship.
• Why does this happen? Because the brain mechanisms for judging intrapersonal warmth overlap with the mechanisms for judging physical warmth, and so one influences the other.
• “implicit egotism”, which describes our attraction to things that remind us of ourselves.
• An experiment was conducted in which a group of men were shown photographs of women. But the images of the women were manipulated to make their pupils more dilated. Most men felt photographs of women whose pupils were dilated to be more attractive. This is because dilated pupils are a biological sign of arousal in women. The men didn’t know this but their brains did.

  Why are we conscious?

• Consciousness gets involved when the unexpected happens, when we need to work out what to do next.
• Our brain tries to be on autopilot most of the time, but it’s not possible in real world.
• It also helps in correcting the conflicts with the brain. For example, when you want to eat an ice cream but you know you will regret it later. Then a decision has to be made.
• Consciousness is a way for billions of cells to see themselves as a unified whole, a way for a complex system to hold up a mirror to itself.

  When consciousness goes missing

• Ken parks killed his inlaws while sleep walking. He has no memory of what had happened. He was later found not guilty and was released

  The feeling of free will

• The conscious mind excels at telling itself the narrative of being in control.
• There is no clear idea whether free will exists or not.
• The good news is that the brain’s immense complexity means that in actuality, nothing is predictable.
• Each individual brain is embedded in a world of other brains. All the human neurons on the planet are influencing one other, creating a system of unimaginable complexity.
• Our lives are steered by forces far beyond our capacity for awareness or control.

  How Do I Decide?

  The sound of a decision

• The brain has no pain receptors, So you can stay awake during a brain surgery
• We can see an image and two different view. This is known as perceptual bi-stability.

  The brain is a machine built from conflict

• By itself, a single neuron has no meaningful influence. But each neuron is connected to thousands of others, and they in turn connect to thousands of others, and so on in a massive, loopy, intertwining network.
• When you have to make a choice, The neurons in your brain communicate with each other to make a decision.
• The brain runs on conflicts - What to choose, how much and so on.

• It’s hard to read out the right colors because one side of your brain tries to identify the color while the other part tries to read the word. The reading process has become deeply engraved and an automated process. Therefore you have to suppress the impulse to read.
• Imagine you have to pull a lever to stop a trolley that’s going to hit 4 people but by doing so you will change the path and the trolley will hit and kill another person in a different track
• In the second scenario, You have to push a person into the track to stop the trolley from hitting 4 people.
• Most people will find it difficult to make a choice in the second scenario but in both scenarios you are trading one life for 4 others.
• This is because in first scenario, For the brain it’s just a math problem. The part involved in solving logical problems is activated.
• But in the second scenario, You have to physically interact with the man and push him to death. Brain regions involved in emotions is activated
• In second scenario ,We are caught in a conflict. One part of brain tells us 1 death is better than 4 while other part triggers a gut feeling that killing someone is wrong.

  States of the body help you decide

• The physical signals from the body give a quick summary of what’s going on and what to do about it. To land on a choice, the body and the brain have to be in close communication.
• Case of Tammy

  Travelling to the future

• Across the animal kingdom, every creature is wired to seek reward.
• Water and food are called primary rewards, which directly address biological needs.
• Humans being can be steered by secondary rewards. Sometimes we put it over our primary needs.
• We can find even very abstract concepts rewarding, such as the feeling that we are valued by our local community.
• As Read Montague points out, “sharks don’t go on hunger strikes”.
• When faced with a decision, our brains simulate different outcomes to generate a mockup of what our future might be. Mentally, we can disconnect from the present moment and voyage to a world that doesn’t yet exist.
• The brain imposes a value on each choice we have and then decides which ones the best.
• When there’s a mismatch between your expectation and your reality, this midbrain dopamine system broadcasts a signal that re-evaluates the price point. That prediction error signal allows the rest of the brain to adjust its expectations to try to be closer to reality next time.
• The dopamine acts as an error corrector

  The power of now

• Options right in front of us tend to be valued higher than those we merely simulate.
• It’s why car dealers want you to get in and test-drive the cars, why clothing stores want you to try on the clothes.
• We may want to go to the gym or take a diet, But the things right in front of us seem more enjoyable.
• Can we do anything about the seduction of the now? Yes, you can take inspiration from a man who lived 3,000 years ago.

  Overcoming the power of now: the Ulysses contract

• Ulysees, on his way back from Trojan war, he realised his ship would soon be passing island where beautiful sirens lived.
• The sirens were known to sing so melodious that the sailors would become enchanted and will crash their ship into rocks to get to them.
• But Ulysees wanted to hear their song nevertheless. So he asked his crew members to tie him to the mast and they filled their ears with beeswax. They rowed under strict orders to ignore any of his pleas and cries and writhing.
• Ulysses knew that his future self would be in no position to make good decisions. So the Ulysses of sound mind arranged things so that he couldn’t do the wrong thing. This sort of deal between your present and future self is known as a Ulysses contract.
• In the case of going to the gym, your simple Ulysses contract can be to arrange in advance for a friend to meet you there: the pressure to uphold the social contract lashes you to the mast.

  The invisible mechanisms of decision making

• A study in 2011 analyzed a thousand rulings from judges, and found it likely wasn’t about any of those factors. It was mostly about hunger. Just after the parole board had enjoyed a food break, a prisoner’s chance of parole rose to its highest point of 65%. But a prisoner seen towards the end of a session had the lowest chances: just a 20% likelihood of a favorable outcome.
• Some psychologists describe this effect as “ego-depletion,” meaning that higher-level cognitive areas involved in executive function and planning (for example, the prefrontal cortex) get fatigued.
• Consider the choice of monogamy, oxytocin is a key ingredient in the magic of bonding. Oxytocin increased bonding to their partner.

  Decisions and society

• Drug addiction at the core is the issue of biology of the brain.
• The drugs effectively tell the brain that this decision is better than all the other things it could be doing.
• Drug addiction is a problem for millions of people. But prisons aren’t the place to solve the problem. Equipped with an understanding of how human brains actually make decisions, we can develop new approaches beyond punishment.
• Those who break the social contracts need to be off the streets for the safety of society – but what happens in prison does not have to be based only on bloodlust, but also on evidence-based, meaningful rehabilitation.

  Do I Need You?

  Half of Us is Other People

• We though we feel independent, each of our brain operates in a rich web of interaction with each other.
• We connect even with non-human characters in animated films. We have no difficulty assigning intentions to them. Therefore we laugh and cry over their escapades.
• Our brain is constantly making social judgements. Deciding who is friend or who is foe or what are others’ intentions.
• We acquire this skill even as a baby. The brain comes with inborn instincts to detect who’s trustworthy.

  The subtle signals around us

• Our brain is continuously evaluating the expressions and body languages of others.
• In an experiment conducted, it was seen that people mirror the expression that they see. But the movement of muscles are too slight to be noticed. This is called mirroring.
• This throws light on why married couples resemble each other. Longer they been married, stronger the effect.
• When your brain tries to understand what others are thinking from their facial expressions, It mimics the expression. This gives the brain a rapid estimate about what the other person is feeling. Without this mirroring it would be tough for the brain to do so.

  The joys and sorrows of empathy

• Most of us must have cried watching a movie. Why do we do so even tho we know all of that is fake?
• This is because when you see someone go through pain, The pain matrix inside your brain get activated. Not the areas involved with physical pain but those of emotion experience of pain.
• This is the basis of empathy
• What’s the evolutionary benefit? By feeling what other are feeling, We can predict what they will do next.
• But the accuracy of empathy is also limited. We might get tricked by those who can put on a good act and take advantage of our empathy.
• Social interaction is also very necessary for the brain. Without it, the brain suffers.
• Being left out or social rejection activates the pain matrix in the brain.

  Beyond survival of the fittest

• This theory explains that the individual with more survival traits survives. But this alone is not enough to explain some aspect of our behaviour like why do we help each other?
• This led to a concept called group selection : if a group is composed entirely of people who cooperate, everyone in the group will be better off for it.
• Forming alliances and striving together is how we survived
• But this also has a dark side, For every ingroup, There must exist at least one outgroup.

  Outgroups

• There are incidents throughout the world where the ingroups has harmed or killed the outgroups.

  Some more equal than others

• An experiment was conducted in which people were shown getting stabbed with a needle. The hands were labelled with religions and atheist. They showed larger empathetic response when someone from their ingroup was hurt.
• One might have opinions about the divisiveness of religion, but there’s a deeper point to note here: in the study, even atheists showed a larger response to pain in the hand labelled “atheist”, and less of an emphatic response to other labels. So the result is not fundamentally about religion – it’s about which team you’re on.
• If we want a bright future for our species, we’ll want to continue to research how human brains interact – the dangers as well as the opportunities. Because there’s no avoiding the truth etched into the wiring of our brains: we need each other.

  Who Will We Be?

  A flexible, computational device

• A brain is neuroplastic. To understand how flexible the brain is the author discusses about the case of Cameron molt who had to remove half her brain in a surgery due to disease called Rasmussen’s Encephalitis.
• Even after losing half her brain, she performed well in school and was indistinguishable from other children. This is because her brain dynamically rewired itself to take other the missing parts and functions.

  Plug and play: an extrasensory future

• Our brain doesn’t care about the way it receives the data. The tries to process all the data it receives. This means people who can’t can be fed visual information through other means.
• An example of this is BrainPort, which works by delivering tine electrical shocks to the tongue. The blind subject wears a glass that converts camera pixels to electrical pulses.
• If this sounds crazy, just remember that seeing is just electrical signals streaming through your brain.

  Sensory Augmentation

• As discussed earlier, We can process data through other means than normal ways. This means we can consume the data from the internet and actually “feel” it by feeding it to the brain.

  How to get a better body

• We can also interpret the signals from the brain which can in turn be used to control robotic arms which enables people to move the arm as if it’s their own through their thought.
• It’s not just limited to this. At some point in future, we might become able to control machinery with our mind. They will just like an extra limb.

  Stayin’ alive

• The author discusses cryopreservation. It is when the body of a dead person is frozen and stored in the hope that in future humanity will create a technology powerful enough to revive them.

  Digital immortality

• We might at some point future be able to copy a human brain to a computer.

  Does consciousness require the physical stuff?

• The idea is that the physical matter of the brain in not important. What the brain physically is doesn’t matter, but what it does. This is called computational hypothesis. If this is true, we can run the brain on any substrate.

  Consciousness as an emergent property

• Each neuron is simply a specialized cell but when these neuron group together, It creates something extraordinary.