Just Finished Reading: The Brain – The Story of You by David Eagleman (FP: 2015)

Being a sucker for such things – especially about my 2nd favourite organ – I couldn’t help picking this up especially after enjoying the BBC TV series based on it. Just like the series itself the book is rather on the light side. Although there is much talk about how the brain works, what happens when parts of it fail and much else besides there’s not a lot of hard science in here. If that kind of thing puts you off reading science books you have no fear with this volume! But that’s certainly not to denigrate it. It may be popular and breezy but it’s not slack or flabby. The author is a practicing neuroscientist and he knows his stuff. What he also knows is how to communicate his detailed knowledge to an educated audience.

So you’ll learn how brains grow from childhood until around 25 years of age and how they prune themselves over that time laying down the complex wiring that becomes you. You’ll also see the plastic brain can rewire itself the navigate around injury, how important memory is, why we mirror the emotions of others (even without consciously doing so), why we become addicted and what we can do about it, the deep seating roots of prejudice and group identification, as well as strange little facts like we’re much more likely to say nice things about people if we have a warm drink in our hands…..

The brain is a fascinating piece of evolutionary design. Giving rise to consciousness for an, as yet, unknown reason yet acting in the main beyond the reach of consciousness this most complex device is presently only just beginning to be understood. A clear indication of our early and faltering steps to understand the brain is our singular failure to create anything close to an intelligent machine. What we do easily, like walking, seeing, picking up objects, or catching them in flight, has proven to be incredibly difficult to recreate with our technology. It is only recently that we fully understood how complex and difficult apparently simple things are. Touching on this at the end of the book the author also muses on the great science-fiction idea of uploading people into computers. Presently, he freely admits, this is way beyond our present technology and is likely to remain so for decades to come. The amount of information held by an adult brain at any one moment is staggering and can only theoretically be stored is, as yet, undreamed of computers. Whether or not this uploaded personality would be ‘you’ is, again he admits, a whole other ballgame. But someday it will be attempted and the results should be illuminating at the very least.

Being a materialist I certainly agree with the author that your brain is you. The physical brains ‘wiring’ directs the electrical impulses that microsecond to microsecond create your mind out of emergent order – like an ants nest but considerably more complex. As each ant performs its task ignorant of the larger hive/nest so each individual cell in the brain does its set task but together – with the billions of others – creates a conscious creature: matter able to regard itself and ponder the meaning of things. Whilst not exactly ground breaking or life changing this is still a good entry port into the wonderful world of the brain and is a good starting point for getting down in the weeds of detail. More human biology to come. Recommended.