Fundamentally, the brain is a prediction machine, and that is the driving engine behind its constant self-reconfiguration. By modeling the state of the world, the brain reshapes itself to have good expectations, and therefore to be maximally sensitive to the unexpected.

The larger principle that ties all those scenarios together is relevance. Your brain adjusts itself according to what you spend your time on, as long as those tasks have alignment with rewards or goals.

The ancient Greeks noticed it. Lacking the tools of modern neuroscience but having a sharp eye, they defined several different levels of learning. The highest level—where the best learning occurs—is achieved when a student is invested, curious, interested. Through our modern lens, we would say that a particular formula of neurotransmitters is

If it seems strange that we could have these emotional reactions to new data streams, it bears remembering that all the meaning in our lives is simply built of data streams that carry importance in the context of our goals.

What if you could detect not only the magnetic field around objects but also the one around the planet? After all, animals do it. Turtles return to the same beaches on which they were hatched to lay their own eggs. Migrating birds wing each year from Greenland to Antarctica and then back again to the same spot. Pigeons who carry messages between

In ways we are still working to understand, the brain is stunningly gifted at taking in these signals and extracting patterns. To those patterns it assigns meaning. With the meaning you have subjective experience. The brain is an organ that converts sparks in the dark into the euphonious picture show of your world. All of the hues and aromas and

For a short time, the government of France forced newly released prisoners to marry local prostitutes, and then the newlywed couples were linked with chains and shipped off to Louisiana to settle the land. But even these French efforts were insufficient.

The strategy of interaction with the world allows the colossal machinery of the brain to take shape from a relatively small set of instructions. It’s an ingenious approach for unpacking a brain (and body) from a single microscopic egg.

when children are born cross-eyed or wall-eyed, the activity from the two eyes is not well correlated (as it would be with aligned eyes). If the problem is not addressed, the child will not develop normal stereo vision—that is, the capacity to determine depth from the small differences between what the two eyes are seeing.