Though spiritualism had initiated in my quest of knowing the brain and how it functions, one of the initial scientific exposure about it came from the book “The Brain” by David Eagleman. I never ever felt while reading this book that it is written by a scientist, a neuroscientist because narration is so lucid and words are so simple that it looks like bed time story. It paved way for me to buy more books, pick courses on neuroscience online and dig deep to understand what I want to understand better.
Buying a book is very easy but going beyond the first few pages is very difficult. It tells you that whether you will be able to finish reading the book or not. But this book is so simple worded and lucid that not only it kept me interested in the book but it ignited y interest in the very topic itself and it is growing year after year. This kind of impact it had on me.
Some of examples are here:
While explaining “AM IN THE SUM OF MY MEMORIES?”, he writes, “Our brains and bodies change so much during our life that – like a clock’s hour hand – it’s difficult to detect the changes. Every four months your red blood cells are entirely replaced, for instance, and your skin cells are replaced every few weeks. 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. Perhaps memory can serve as the thread that makes you who you are. It sits on the core of your identity, providing a single, continuous sense of self.”
Further, explaining this very thought, he writes, “Rather than memory being an accurate video recording on a moment in your life, it is fragile brain state from your bygone time that must be resurrected for you to remember”.
In the chapter “The Storyteller”, He writes, “Your brain serves up a narrative- and each of us believes whatever narrative it tells. Whatever you’re falling for a visual illusion, or believing the dream you happened to be trapped in, or experiencing letters in colour, or accepting a delusion as true during an episode of schizophrenia, we each accept our realities however our brain accepts them.
Despite the feeling that we’re directly experiencing the world out there, our reality is ultimately built in the dark, in a foreign language of electrochemical signals. The activity churning across vast neural networks gets turned into your story of this, your private experience of the world: the feeling of this book in your hands, the light in the room, the smell of roses, the sound of others speaking.
Even more strangely, it’s likely that every brain tells a slightly different narrative. For every situation with the multiple witnesses, different brains are having different private experiences. With seven billion human brains wandering the planet (and trillions of animal brain), there’s no single version of reality. Each brain carries its own truth.
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.”
These are just few snippets of the amazing book. It is a must read for everyone who wants to know about truth, or who believe their truth is the real truth and other’s truth are lie, or who wants to know why someone behaves the way he/she behaves or the people like me who are simply curious to know about the most mysterious thing in the world; human brain.
You can buy the book from Amazon following this link The Brain