Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain

Neuroscientists like to say that your day-to-day experience is a carefully controlled hallucination, constrained by the world and your body but ultimately constructed by your brain.

The same creativity that permits us to make art and music also lets us draw a line in the dirt and call it the border of a country.

Other animals are not inferior to humans. They are uniquely and effectively adapted to their environments. Your brain is not more evolved than a rat or lizard brain, just differently evolved.

Why do the words you encounter have such wide-ranging effects inside you? Because many brain regions that process language also control the insides of your body, including major organs and systems that support your body budget.

Sometimes we’re responsible for things not because they’re our fault, but because we’re the only ones who can change them.

Their communications may become stronger or weaker depending on what’s happening in the world and in your body, but the conversation never stops until you die.

Hub damage is associated with depression, schizophrenia, dyslexia, chronic pain, dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and other disorders.

Brains aren’t wired for accuracy. They’re wired to keep us alive.

Brains have a lot of common features; minds, less so, because minds depend in part on micro-wiring that is tuned and pruned by culture.