The Brain: The Story of You

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.

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.

Each of us is on our own trajectory – steered by our genes and our experiences – and as a result every brain has a different internal life. Brains are as unique as snowflakes.

No one is having an experience of the objective reality that really exists; each creature perceives only what it has evolved to perceive.

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.

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.

When making life-and-death decisions, unchecked reason can be dangerous; our emotions are a powerful and often insightful constituency, and we’d be remiss to exclude them from the parliamentary voting. The world would not be better if we all behaved like robots.

Equipped with an understanding of how human brains actually make decisions, we can develop new approaches beyond punishment. As we come to better appreciate the operations inside our brains, we can better align our behavior with our best intentions... Although societies possess deeply ingrained impulses for punishment, a different kind of criminal justice system – one with a closer relationship to the neuroscience of decisions – can be imagined. Such a legal system wouldn’t let anyone off the hook, but it would be more concerned with how to deal with law breakers with an eye toward their future rather than writing them off because of their past.

To empathize with another person is to literally feel their pain. You run a compelling simulation of what it would be like if you were in that situation. Our capacity for this is why stories – like movies and novels – are so absorbing and so pervasive across human culture. Whether it’s about total strangers or made-up characters, you experience their agony and their ecstasy. You fluidly become them, live their lives, and stand in their vantage points. When you see another person suffer, you can try to tell yourself that it’s their issue, not yours – but neurons deep in your brain can’t tell the difference.

Genocide is only possible when dehumanization happens on a massive scale, and the perfect tool for this job is propaganda: it keys right into the neural networks that understand other people, and dials down the degree to which we empathize with them.

Education plays a key role in preventing genocide. Only by understanding the neural drive to form ingroups and outgroups – and the standard tricks by which propaganda plugs into this drive – can we hope to interrupt the paths of dehumanization that end in mass atrocity.

You might assume that you end at the border of your skin, but there’s a sense in which there’s no way to mark the end of you and the beginning of all those around you. Your neurons and those of everyone on the planet interplay in a giant, shifting super-organism. What we demarcate as you is simply a network in a larger network.

و [بوسهل] همیشه چشم نهاده بودی، تا پادشاهی بزرگ و جبار بر چاکری خشم گرفتی و آن چاکر را لت زدی و فرو گرفتی، این مرد از کرانه بجَستی و فرصتی جُستی و تضریب کردی و المی بزرگ بدین چاکر رسانیدی و آنگاه لاف زدی که: فلان را من فرو گرفتم. ... و خردمندان دانستندی که نه چنانست و سری می‌جنبانیدندی و پوشیده خنده می‌زدندی که نه چنانست