So God sits on the edge of Her bed and weeps at night, because the only thing everyone can agree upon is that they’re all in Hell.
And just before you lose your final human faculties, you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human.
The brain runs its show incognito.
As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems.
The problem is that incarceration triggers an expensive and vicious cycle of relapse and re-imprisonment. It breaks people’s existing social circles and employment opportunities, and gives them new social circles and new employment opportunities – ones that typically fuel their addiction.
Evolution is smarter than you are.
What does this research tell us? It tells us that fiscally concerned strippers should eschew contraception and double up their shifts just before ovulation.
Computational devices don’t have to be made out of silicon – they can also be made of moving water droplets or of Lego. What matters is not what a computer is made of, but how its parts interact.
God realized that He had no concept of the skills required to run an organization of this magnitude.
As the neuroscientist Wolf Singer recently suggested: even when we cannot measure what is wrong with a criminal’s brain, we can fairly safely assume that something is wrong.
Positive traits like conscientiousness, purpose in life, and keeping busy were protective.
Vision is active, not passive. There is more than one way for the visual system to interpret the stimulus, and so it flips back and forth between the possibilities.
But our brains are always crushing ambiguity into choices.
One of the most impressive features of brains – and especially human brains – is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes its way.
Through practice, repeated signals have been passed along neural networks, strengthening synapses and thereby burning the skill into the circuitry. In.
The part of the light spectrum that is visible to us is less than a ten-trillionth of it. The rest of the spectrum––carrying TV shows, radio signals, microwaves, X-rays, gamma rays, cell phone conversations, and so on––flows through us with no awareness on our part.
This is the hallmark of a robust biological system: political parties can perish in a tragic accident and the society will still run, sometimes with little more than a hiccup to the system. It may be that for every strange clinical case in which brain damage leads to a bizarre change in behavior or perception, there are hundreds of cases in which parts of the brain are damaged with no detectable clinical sign.
Specifically, cognitive exercise – that is, activity that keeps the brain active, like crosswords, reading, driving, learning new skills, and having responsibilities – was protective.
You gleefully say, “I just thought of something!”, when in fact your brain performed an enormous amount of work before your moment of genius struck. When an idea is served up from behind the scenes, your neural circuitry has been working on it for hours or days or years, consolidating information and trying out new combinations. But you take credit without further wonderment at the vast, hidden machinery behind the scenes.
It may be that what the brain physically is doesn’t matter, but instead what it does.