The human brain represents 3% of the body’s weight, yet it uses 20% of it’s energy. The brain contains tens of billions of neurons, an enormous amount comparable to the number of stars in the Milky Way. But how much do we really know about our most complex asset? And more importantly – what’s still left to figure out?
Learning How Little We Know About the Brain [New York Times] by James Gorman
Article | 6 minutes
“So many large and small questions remain unanswered. How is information encoded and transferred from cell to cell or from network to network of cells? Science found a genetic code but there is no brain-wide neural code; no electrical or chemical alphabet exists that can be recombined to say ‘red’ or ‘fear’ or ‘wink’ or ‘run.’ And no one knows whether information is encoded differently in various parts of the brain.”
3 Clues to Understanding Your Brain [TED] by Vilayanur Ramachandran
Video | 24 minutes
“Here is this mass of jelly, three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can contemplate the meaning of infinity and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity. And this peculiar recursive quality that we call self-awareness, which I think is the holy grail of neuroscience, of neurology, and hopefully, someday, we’ll understand how that happens.”
The Truth About The Left Brain / Right Brain Relationship [NPR] by Tania Lombrozo
Article | 18 minutes
“There are, of course, differences in how people learn and think, what they like, and what they are like (although, since everyone’s brain is different, I think the similarities are actually more surprising than the differences). Some of these differences may arise because of individual differences in how the hemispheres are organized or which hemisphere tends to be used in particular circumstances. Given that the hemispheres do operate somewhat independently, the question of how their independent processing is eventually combined and/or which hemisphere gets to ‘take control’ of processing for a particular task is one that we are only beginning to understand.”
Do People Only Use 10% of Their Brains? [Scientific America] by Robynne Boyd
Article | 4 minutes
“Although it’s true that at any given moment all of the brain’s regions are not concurrently firing, brain researchers using imaging technology have shown that, like the body’s muscles, most are continually active over a 24-hour period.”
Longer Reads
- The Human Brain Book by Rita Carter
- Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V. S. Ramachandran, Sandra Blakeslee, and Oliver Sacks
- Mapping the Mind by Rita Carter
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