We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). To fend off this intrusion during sleep, Eagleman theorizes, our vision area continues to operate by generating dreams. Thus, when the vision region falls silent from blindness or even a few hours in a blindfold, input from hearing or touch moves in. If one area stops functioning, others take over. Neurons compete as fiercely as they cooperate. If a child is kept in the dark and silence for several years after birth, they will never see or talk. Children can learn several languages fluently, but after age 10, new languages come with an accent. At birth it possesses enormous flexibility because it must literally learn how to function. 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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