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Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain Hardcover – November 17, 2020
by Lisa Feldman Barrett (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars 1,757 ratings
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From the author of How Emotions Are Made, a captivating collection of short essays about your brain, in the tradition of Astrophysics for People in a Hurry and Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.
Have you ever wondered why you have a brain? Let renowned neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett demystify that big gray blob between your ears. In seven short essays (plus a bite-sized story about how brains evolved), this slim, entertaining, and accessible collection reveals mind-expanding lessons from the front lines of neuroscience research. You'll learn where brains came from, how they're structured (and why it matters), and how yours works in tandem with other brains to create everything you experience. Along the way, you'll also learn to dismiss popular myths such as the idea of a "lizard brain" and the alleged battle between thoughts and emotions, or even between nature and nurture, to determine your behavior.
Sure to intrigue casual readers and scientific veterans alike, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain is full of surprises, humor, and important implications for human nature--a gift of a book that you will want to savor again and again.
Read less
Report incorrect product information.
Print length
192 pages
November 17, 2020
From the Publisher
A conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain
Q: Why do I have a brain?
A: Brain’s didn’t evolve so you can think, feel or see. They evolved to control bodies. Everything your brain does – think, feel, see, hear, etc. -- it does in the service of controlling your body. This is your brain’s most important job. Understanding this illuminates mysteries like: How are your mind and body linked? How does chronic stress seep under the skin and make you sick? Why are physical illnesses like heart disease and Parkinson’s disease so similar to mental illnesses like depression? And why there is a growing epidemic of depression and anxiety around the world?
Q: How does your brain work?
A: During much of the last century, scientists thought your brain worked sort of like a muscle – the world stimulates it, and it reacts. The stimulation would come from the outside world in the form of sights, sounds, smells, and other sense data. But scientists have learned that brain’s billions of neurons are continuously in conversation, guessing what might happen next and preparing your body in advance to deal with it. It’s issuing predictions that launch what you do and see and feel, but it happens so quickly that you feel like you’re reacting!
Here’s one way to think about it: From the moment you are born until the moment that you die, your brain is locked inside a dark, silent box called your skull. It continuously receives scraps of data from the outside world, like waves of light (from your eyes), chemicals (through your nose and on your tongue), and changes in air pressure (in your ears). Your brain has to use these scraps of information to figure out how to keep your body alive and well Is that CRASH outside caused by a racoon in your trash can, someone dropping a box on the ground, or a car bumping into another car outside your home? Is that tightness in your chest a sore muscle from lifting something heavy, a feeling of anxiety, or a sign that you might be having heart trouble? In every moment, it must figure out what caused the current barrage of sense data and what to do about it, using your memories of past experiences. So your brain isn’t reactive, it’s predictive.
Q: I’ve heard that the human brain has an ancient area, called the “lizard brain,” that can hijack the rational part of the brain (the neocortex) and cause me to say & do things that are ill-advised. Is this true?
A: No. The only animal that has a lizard brain is a lizard. The so-called lizard brain in humans is a folk tale that was popularized in the 1970s, though its roots stretch back to Plato in Ancient Greece. Scientists in the early and mid-1900s examined a bunch of animal brains and determined that the human brain had parts that other mammal and reptile brains don’t, crafting the narrative of a layered brain. Supposedly, the brain’s core contains reptilian parts that give us instincts, wrapped in newer mammalian parts that give us emotions, wrapped in human parts that give us rationality. This story, called the triune brain, says the human brain evolved in layers like a birthday cake, where the topmost layer, the icing, handles rationality.
Since the 1970s, however, scientists have been able to compare brain cells by their genetic markers, and it turns out that mice, rats, dogs, cats, horses, and every other mammalian species studied so far (and possibly the brains of fish, lizards, and birds, too ) follow the same manufacturing plan. Basically, you have the same brain plan as a bloodsucking lamprey.
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of November 2020: Barrett’s pithy exploration of the mysterious brain is breezy, fun, and, most important, delivers information with a vividness that will make it actually stick in readers’ memories. This popular science book packs a lot in a small space—much like a person’s brain, appropriately. —Adrian Liang, Amazon Book Review
Review
"This short, concise, readable, thought-challenging view of the complex brain will pique the reader and puzzle the mind wondering what reality really is."—San Francisco Book Review "A deeply researched, compulsively readable, subtly philosophical tour through the human brain…. In just a few pages, Barrett dispels myths so deeply entrenched that many of us assumed they were indisputable scientific fact (goodbye, lizard brain!) And she does all of this with the effortless concision of a poet, not a word wasted…. [Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain] deserves to be read and re-read and then, just as important, to be thought about deeply."—Dan Pink "Highly recommended, this smart pithy primer on the brain is fascinating.”—Michael Pollan, via Twitter “An excellent education in brain science…[Feldman Barrett] deftly employs metaphor and anecdote to deliver an insightful overview of her favorite subject… so short and sweet that most readers will continue to the 35-page appendix, in which the author delves more deeply, but with no less clarity, into topics ranging from teleology to the Myers-Briggs personality test to ‘Plato’s writings about the human psyche.’ Outstanding popular science.”—Kirkus, STARRED "What about that 'three-pound blob between your ears'? In seven essays about the brain and a half-size one about its evolution…Barrett has crafted a well-written tribute to this wow-inducing organ."—Booklist “[A] must-read science book. Neuroscientist Barrett takes readers on a journey from the first earthly creatures, through the musings of ancient philosophers, and to present-day neuroscience.”—Discover Magazine “Beautiful writing and sublime insights that will blow your mind like a string of firecrackers. If you want a rundown of the brain and its magic, start here.”—David Eagleman, Stanford neuroscientist, New York Times bestselling author of Incognito and Livewired "Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain reads like a novel—one whose main character is all of us. In fresh and lively prose, Barrett provides deep insight into what brains are for, how they operate and are programmed, how they create the ‘reality’ we experience, and how they ultimately produce our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Read this book! It will make you smarter about yourself, and your species."—Leonard Mlodinow, New York Times bestselling author of The Drunkard’s Walk, Subliminal, and Elastic “A radical and provocative look at a range of pervasive misconceptions, emerging discoveries, and enticing mysteries regarding our very nature as individuals and intertwined social beings. By illuminating our unimaginably complex, constantly changing brain/body networks, Barrett gets to the heart of the new understanding of who and what we are as creatures, and how much latitude and agency we have."—Jon Kabat-Zinn, Founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), author of Full Catastrophe Living and The Healing Power of Mindfulness "Lisa Feldman Barrett is a pioneer in neuroscience and one of today’s most provocat —
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Product details
Publisher : Mariner Books (November 17, 2020)
Language : English
Hardcover : 192 pages
ISBN-10 : 0358157145
ISBN-13 : 978-0358157144
Item Weight : 8.8 ounces
Dimensions : 5 x 0.77 x 7.5 inchesBest Sellers Rank: #46,413 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)#57 in Neuroscience (Books)
#106 in Popular Neuropsychology
#267 in Cognitive Psychology (Books)Customer Reviews:
4.5 out of 5 stars 1,757 ratings
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About the author
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Lisa Feldman Barrett
Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D. is among the top 1% most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. She is a University Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University with appointments at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Barrett was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in neuroscience in 2019, and she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada. She lives in Boston. More at LisaFeldmanBarrett.com. Twitter: @LFeldmanBarrett.
====
Listen
Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain Hardcover – November 17, 2020
by Lisa Feldman Barrett (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars 1,757 ratings
Kindle
from $8.98Read with Our Free App
Audiobook$0.00Free with your Audible trial
Hardcover
$17.91
44 Used from $2.2329 New from $16.53
Paperback
$12.97
32 Used from $6.5629 New from $11.74
From the author of How Emotions Are Made, a captivating collection of short essays about your brain, in the tradition of Astrophysics for People in a Hurry and Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.
Have you ever wondered why you have a brain? Let renowned neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett demystify that big gray blob between your ears. In seven short essays (plus a bite-sized story about how brains evolved), this slim, entertaining, and accessible collection reveals mind-expanding lessons from the front lines of neuroscience research. You'll learn where brains came from, how they're structured (and why it matters), and how yours works in tandem with other brains to create everything you experience. Along the way, you'll also learn to dismiss popular myths such as the idea of a "lizard brain" and the alleged battle between thoughts and emotions, or even between nature and nurture, to determine your behavior.
Sure to intrigue casual readers and scientific veterans alike, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain is full of surprises, humor, and important implications for human nature--a gift of a book that you will want to savor again and again.
Read less
Report incorrect product information.
Print length
192 pages
November 17, 2020
From the Publisher
A conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain
Q: Why do I have a brain?
A: Brain’s didn’t evolve so you can think, feel or see. They evolved to control bodies. Everything your brain does – think, feel, see, hear, etc. -- it does in the service of controlling your body. This is your brain’s most important job. Understanding this illuminates mysteries like: How are your mind and body linked? How does chronic stress seep under the skin and make you sick? Why are physical illnesses like heart disease and Parkinson’s disease so similar to mental illnesses like depression? And why there is a growing epidemic of depression and anxiety around the world?
Q: How does your brain work?
A: During much of the last century, scientists thought your brain worked sort of like a muscle – the world stimulates it, and it reacts. The stimulation would come from the outside world in the form of sights, sounds, smells, and other sense data. But scientists have learned that brain’s billions of neurons are continuously in conversation, guessing what might happen next and preparing your body in advance to deal with it. It’s issuing predictions that launch what you do and see and feel, but it happens so quickly that you feel like you’re reacting!
Here’s one way to think about it: From the moment you are born until the moment that you die, your brain is locked inside a dark, silent box called your skull. It continuously receives scraps of data from the outside world, like waves of light (from your eyes), chemicals (through your nose and on your tongue), and changes in air pressure (in your ears). Your brain has to use these scraps of information to figure out how to keep your body alive and well Is that CRASH outside caused by a racoon in your trash can, someone dropping a box on the ground, or a car bumping into another car outside your home? Is that tightness in your chest a sore muscle from lifting something heavy, a feeling of anxiety, or a sign that you might be having heart trouble? In every moment, it must figure out what caused the current barrage of sense data and what to do about it, using your memories of past experiences. So your brain isn’t reactive, it’s predictive.
Q: I’ve heard that the human brain has an ancient area, called the “lizard brain,” that can hijack the rational part of the brain (the neocortex) and cause me to say & do things that are ill-advised. Is this true?
A: No. The only animal that has a lizard brain is a lizard. The so-called lizard brain in humans is a folk tale that was popularized in the 1970s, though its roots stretch back to Plato in Ancient Greece. Scientists in the early and mid-1900s examined a bunch of animal brains and determined that the human brain had parts that other mammal and reptile brains don’t, crafting the narrative of a layered brain. Supposedly, the brain’s core contains reptilian parts that give us instincts, wrapped in newer mammalian parts that give us emotions, wrapped in human parts that give us rationality. This story, called the triune brain, says the human brain evolved in layers like a birthday cake, where the topmost layer, the icing, handles rationality.
Since the 1970s, however, scientists have been able to compare brain cells by their genetic markers, and it turns out that mice, rats, dogs, cats, horses, and every other mammalian species studied so far (and possibly the brains of fish, lizards, and birds, too ) follow the same manufacturing plan. Basically, you have the same brain plan as a bloodsucking lamprey.
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of November 2020: Barrett’s pithy exploration of the mysterious brain is breezy, fun, and, most important, delivers information with a vividness that will make it actually stick in readers’ memories. This popular science book packs a lot in a small space—much like a person’s brain, appropriately. —Adrian Liang, Amazon Book Review
Review
"This short, concise, readable, thought-challenging view of the complex brain will pique the reader and puzzle the mind wondering what reality really is."—San Francisco Book Review "A deeply researched, compulsively readable, subtly philosophical tour through the human brain…. In just a few pages, Barrett dispels myths so deeply entrenched that many of us assumed they were indisputable scientific fact (goodbye, lizard brain!) And she does all of this with the effortless concision of a poet, not a word wasted…. [Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain] deserves to be read and re-read and then, just as important, to be thought about deeply."—Dan Pink "Highly recommended, this smart pithy primer on the brain is fascinating.”—Michael Pollan, via Twitter “An excellent education in brain science…[Feldman Barrett] deftly employs metaphor and anecdote to deliver an insightful overview of her favorite subject… so short and sweet that most readers will continue to the 35-page appendix, in which the author delves more deeply, but with no less clarity, into topics ranging from teleology to the Myers-Briggs personality test to ‘Plato’s writings about the human psyche.’ Outstanding popular science.”—Kirkus, STARRED "What about that 'three-pound blob between your ears'? In seven essays about the brain and a half-size one about its evolution…Barrett has crafted a well-written tribute to this wow-inducing organ."—Booklist “[A] must-read science book. Neuroscientist Barrett takes readers on a journey from the first earthly creatures, through the musings of ancient philosophers, and to present-day neuroscience.”—Discover Magazine “Beautiful writing and sublime insights that will blow your mind like a string of firecrackers. If you want a rundown of the brain and its magic, start here.”—David Eagleman, Stanford neuroscientist, New York Times bestselling author of Incognito and Livewired "Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain reads like a novel—one whose main character is all of us. In fresh and lively prose, Barrett provides deep insight into what brains are for, how they operate and are programmed, how they create the ‘reality’ we experience, and how they ultimately produce our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Read this book! It will make you smarter about yourself, and your species."—Leonard Mlodinow, New York Times bestselling author of The Drunkard’s Walk, Subliminal, and Elastic “A radical and provocative look at a range of pervasive misconceptions, emerging discoveries, and enticing mysteries regarding our very nature as individuals and intertwined social beings. By illuminating our unimaginably complex, constantly changing brain/body networks, Barrett gets to the heart of the new understanding of who and what we are as creatures, and how much latitude and agency we have."—Jon Kabat-Zinn, Founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), author of Full Catastrophe Living and The Healing Power of Mindfulness "Lisa Feldman Barrett is a pioneer in neuroscience and one of today’s most provocat —
Read more
Product details
Publisher : Mariner Books (November 17, 2020)
Language : English
Hardcover : 192 pages
ISBN-10 : 0358157145
ISBN-13 : 978-0358157144
Item Weight : 8.8 ounces
Dimensions : 5 x 0.77 x 7.5 inchesBest Sellers Rank: #46,413 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)#57 in Neuroscience (Books)
#106 in Popular Neuropsychology
#267 in Cognitive Psychology (Books)Customer Reviews:
4.5 out of 5 stars 1,757 ratings
Videos
Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!Upload your video
About the author
Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Follow
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D. is among the top 1% most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. She is a University Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University with appointments at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Barrett was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in neuroscience in 2019, and she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada. She lives in Boston. More at LisaFeldmanBarrett.com. Twitter: @LFeldmanBarrett.
====
https://www.scribd.com/document/544583923/Seven-and-a-Half-Lessons-about-the-Brain-Lisa-Feldman-Barrett
G. C. Carter
5.0 out of 5 stars Provides insightful summary of new information how the evolution and function of the brainReviewed in the United States on February 4, 2021
Verified Purchase
The book entitled: “Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain” by Lisa Feldman Barrett provided its greatest value to this reader by challenging things that I had previously been taught and knew or thought that I knew about the brain. This book provides another explanation of how and why the human brain operates that way that it does. The book is worth purchasing and reading. The author, Professor Barrett writes
“Animals had gobbled one another before, but now the eating was more purposeful. Hunting didn’t require a brain, but it was a big step toward developing one.
The emergence of predators during the Cambrian period transformed the planet into a more competitive and dangerous place. Both predators and prey evolved to sense more of the world around them. With the arrival of greater senses, the most critical question in existence became Is that blob in the distance good to eat, or will it eat me?
When it came to body budgeting, prediction beat reaction. A creature that prepared its movement before the predator struck was more likely to be around tomorrow than a creature that awaited a predator’s pounce. Creatures that predicted correctly most of the time, or made nonfatal mistakes and learned from them, did well. Those that frequently predicted poorly, missed threats, or false-alarmed about threats that never materialized didn’t do so well. They explored their environment less, foraged less, and were less likely to reproduce”
“Lesson No. 1 You Have One Brain (Not Three)
According to this evolutionary story, the human brain ended up with three layers—one for surviving, one for feeling, and one for thinking—an arrangement known as the triune brain. Fortunately, we don’t have to reconcile them, because one of them is wrong. The triune brain idea is one of the most successful and widespread errors in all of science.
Today, terms like lizard brain and limbic system run rampant through popular-science books and newspaper and magazine articles. … By the 1990s, experts had completely rejected the idea of a three-layered brain. It simply didn’t hold up. … scientists have learned that evolution does not add layers to brain anatomy like geological layers of sedimentary rock. But human brains are obviously different from rat brains, so how exactly did our brains come to differ if not by adding layers?”
Moreover, Professor Barrett writes: “Human brains did not emerge from reptile brains by evolving extra parts for emotion and rationality. Instead, something more interesting happened.” And goes on to state: “… your misnamed neocortex is not a new part; … Anything you read or hear that proclaims the human neocortex, cerebral cortex, or prefrontal cortex to be the root of rationality, or says that the frontal lobe regulates so-called emotional brain areas to keep irrational behavior in check, is simply outdated or woefully incomplete. The triune brain idea and its epic battle between emotion, instinct, and rationality is a modern myth.” And “Your brain is not more evolved than a rat or lizard brain, just differently evolved. … Why do expensive executive-training courses teach CEOs to get a grip on their lizard brains if experts in brain evolution dismissed such ideas decades ago?”
Professor Barrett writes: “Your brain does not “store” memories like computer files to be retrieved and opened later. … what kind of brain do we actually have … Your brain is a network—a collection of parts that are connected to function as a single unit. … Your brain, in turn, is a network of 128 billion neurons connected as a single, massive, and flexible structure.”
The author goes on to write: “Your brain network is organized in much the same way. Its neurons are grouped into clusters that are like airports. … Brain hubs, like airport hubs, make a complicated system efficient. They allow most neurons to participate globally even as they focus more locally. Hubs form the backbone of communication throughout the brain.”
Professor Barrett explains: “Your brain network is not static—it changes continuously. … These network changes happen instantaneously and continually, even as your physical brain structure seems unchanged. In addition, some of these chemicals, such as serotonin and dopamine, can also act on other neurotransmitters to dial up or dial down their effects. … changes are examples of what scientists call plasticity, and they occur throughout your life.” And goes on to state: “A brain doesn’t store memories like files in a computer—it reconstructs them on demand with electricity and swirling chemicals. We call this process remembering but it’s really assembling. … Brains of higher complexity are also more creative. A complex brain can combine past experiences in new ways to deal with things that it has never encountered before; … The highly complex human brain isn’t a pinnacle of evolution, remember; it’s just well adapted to the environments we inhabit.”
In lesson 3, the author explains: “Many animals emerge from the egg or womb with brains that are more fully wired to control their bodies, but little human brains … don’t take on their full adult structure and function until they finish their principal wiring, a process that takes about twenty-five years. …”
On nature vs. nurture, Professor Barrett writes: “Scholars usually discuss this issue in terms of nature versus nurture—which aspects of humanity are built into our genes before birth and which ones we learn from our culture. … so deeply entwined that it’s unhelpful to call them separate names like nature and nurture.” And goes on to provide tantalizing insight into new research, stating: “… To make matters even stranger, a baby’s body requires some additional genes that sneak in from the outside world. These tiny visitors travel inside of bacteria and other critters and affect the brain in ways that scientists are only beginning to understand.” Moreover, Professor Barrett reminds the reader: “… As information travels from the world into the newborn brain, some neurons fire together more frequently than others, causing gradual brain changes that we’ve called plasticity. These changes nudge the infant’s brain toward higher complexity via two processes we’ll call tuning and pruning. … Tuning means strengthening the connections between neurons, … Meanwhile, less-used connections weaken and die off. This is the process of pruning… is critical in a developing brain, because little humans are born with many more connections than they will ultimately use.”
As to language development, Professor Barrett writes: “When tested in a lab, newborns can distinguish a wide range of language sounds, including those that they don’t hear very often. But over time, tuning and pruning will wire the baby’s brain based on the vocal sounds he hears more regularly. Sounds that are frequent cause certain neural connections to be tuned, and the baby’s brain starts to treat those sounds as part of its niche. Sounds that are rare are treated as noise to be ignored, and eventually, related neural connections fall out of use and are pruned away. Scientists think this sort of pruning may be one reason why children have an easier time learning languages than adults do. Different spoken languages use different sets of sounds.”
With respect to early child development, consistent with other research, the author reminds the reader: “In the 1960s, the Communist government of Romania … ,… In some orphanages, babies were warehoused in rows of cribs, with little stimulation or social interaction. Nurses or caregivers would come in and feed them, change them, and put them back in the cribs. That was about it. Nobody cuddled these babies. No one played with them. No one conversed with or sang to them, or shared attention. They were ignored. As a consequence of this social neglect, the Romanian orphans grew up intellectually impaired. They had problems learning language. They had difficulty concentrating and resisting distractions, probably because nobody had shared attention with them, so their brains never developed the wiring for an effective spotlight. They also had trouble controlling themselves. … The scientific evidence is clear on this point. You can’t just feed and water babies and expect their brains to grow normally.”
Professor Barrett goes on to explain: “Each little brain becomes optimized for its particular environment, the one it developed in. Caregivers curate a baby’s physical and social niche, and the baby’s brain learns that niche. When the baby grows up, he perpetuates that niche by passing his culture to the next generation through his words and actions, wiring their brains in turn. This process, called cultural inheritance, is efficient and frugal because evolution doesn’t have to encode all our wiring instructions in genes.”
In Lesson No. 4 Your Brain Predicts (Almost) Everything You Do, Professor Barrett states: “Scientists have had hints for more than a century that brains are predicting organs, though we didn’t decipher those hints until recently. You might have heard of Ivan Pavlov, the nineteenth-century physiologist who famously taught his dogs to salivate upon hearing a sound (usually described as a bell, but it was really a ticking metronome). … Pavlov won a Nobel Prize for discovering this effect, which became known as Pavlovian or classical conditioning, but he didn’t realize that he was discovering how brains predict.”
The author goes on to explain, in a manner that is likely to have practical implications to things like police shooting actions to state in the case of a soldier predicting an enemy but faced with a non-combatant: “The soldier’s brain chose the other option, however; his brain stuck with its prediction in spite of the sense data from the world. This can happen for many reasons, one being that his brain predicted his life was on the line. Brains aren’t wired for accuracy. They’re wired to keep us alive. … You and I seem to sense first and act second. You see an enemy and then raise your rifle. But in your brain, sensing actually comes second. Your brain is wired to prepare for action first, like moving your index finger onto a trigger …”
In Lesson No. 5 Your Brain Secretly Works with Other Brains, Professor Barrett writes: “ How do the people around you influence your body budget and rewire your adult brain? Little by little, your brain becomes tuned and pruned as you interact with others. … Some brains are more attentive to the people around them, and others less so, but everybody has somebody … Being a social species has all sorts of advantages for us Homo sapiens. One advantage is that we live longer if we have close, supportive relationships with other people. … Another advantage of being a social species is that we do better at our jobs when we work with peers and managers whom we trust.
It’s metabolically costly for a brain to deal with things that are hard to predict. No wonder people create so-called echo chambers, surrounding themselves with news and views that reinforce what they already believe—it reduces the metabolic cost and unpleasantness of learning something new. Unfortunately, it also reduces the odds of learning something that might change a person’s mind.”
Professor Barrett goes on to write: “Humans are unique in the animal kingdom, however, because we also regulate each other with words. … Simply put, a long period of chronic stress can harm a human brain. Scientific studies are absolutely clear on this point. … The best thing for your nervous system is another human. The worst thing for your nervous system is also another human. … A more realistic approach to our dilemma, I think, at least in the United States, is to realize that freedom always comes with responsibility. We are free to speak and act, but we are not free from the consequences of what we say and do. We might not care about those consequences, or we might not agree that those consequences are justified, but they nonetheless have costs that we all pay. … The price of personal freedom is personal responsibility for your impact on others. The wiring of all of our brains guarantees it. … Taking our species’ interdependence seriously doesn’t mean restricting rights. It can mean simply understanding the impact we have on one another.” And “Like it or not, we influence the brains and bodies of those around us with our actions and words, and they return the favor.”
In Lesson No. 6 Brains Make More than One Kind of Mind, Professor Barrett writes: “ …you are from a Western culture, like I am, your mind has features called thoughts and emotions, and the two feel fundamentally different from each other. But people who grow up in Balinese culture, as well as in the Ilongot culture in the Philippines, do not experience what we Westerners call cognition and emotion as different kinds of events. They experience what we would call a blend of thinking and feeling, but to them it’s a single thing. … In short, a particular human brain in a particular human body, raised and wired in a particular culture, will produce a particular kind of mind. … It’s important for humans to have many kinds of minds, because variation is critical for the survival of a species. One of Charles Darwin’s greatest insights was that variation is a prerequisite for natural selection to work.”
Professor Barrett goes on to write: “So even when scientists do acknowledge that there are different kinds of minds, they try to tame the variation by organizing it into categories. They sort people into neat little boxes with labels. Some people are labeled as having a warm personality, and others are cold. Some people are more dominant and others more nurturing. Some cultures prioritize individuals over the group, while others do the opposite.” And goes on to write about personality testing stating: “You may have seen personality tests that collect information about you and assign you to a little box. A great example is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI, which sorts people into sixteen little boxes labeled with different personality types to classify you and supposedly help you get ahead in your career. Sadly, the MBTI’s scientific validity is pretty dubious. … Personally, I prefer the Hogwarts Sorting Test, which has only four boxes and is far more rigorous. “
In the final Lesson No. 7 Our Brains Can Create Reality, Professor Barrett discusses details of the brains five C’s: creativity, communication, copying, cooperation, and compression adding additional understanding of the brain.]
This reader found this book worth purchasing and worth reading but disappointing was that the references were not in the traditional and familiar form this reader is familiar with; in particular, instead of footnotes or endnotes with the references, the author stated: “As a professor, I usually include loads of scientific details in my writing, such as descriptions of studies and pointers to journal papers. For these informal essays, however, I’ve moved the full scientific references to my website, sevenandahalflessons.com.” However, when I went to that website, I found it difficult to navigate and apparently, one has to search out each noted reference slowly one at a time. Had the author provided “descriptions of studies and pointers to journal papers” in a more accessible fashion then reader’s confidence in the material likely would have been strengthened. Oddly, this was something new learned by this reader, namely the author explains that the brain predicts the future and then looks for data to corroborate what is expected rather than what many of us presumed, namely that we collect data and logically weigh the data before deciding. As the author, states: “All sorts of animals, including humans, somehow conjure up past experiences to prepare their bodies for action.” So this reader, from past experience, looked to the notes for references preparing to see the explicit references.
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YON - Jan C. Hardenbergh
5.0 out of 5 stars When Barrett "takes lab coat off", it is wonderful!Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2020
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7&1/2 Lessons is brilliant, thin, metaphor laden, rich, frustrating, sometimes overly professorial and truly wonderful. If you liked her earlier book, How Emotions are Made (HEAM), you will like this book, too! Although it is a completely difference book. If you are new to neuroscience, this is the perfect place to start. If you know too much, this book will rustle the leaves in your dendrites.
A novel feature of this book is that you can follow along with the website to see the notes and references without having to flip to the back notes section. The 36 pages of notes seems to have more exposition that the website, but the references are on the website. You can always go back to the notes. Also, 11 pages of index.
Barrett is a master of what I'll "poke & pour" storytelling, starting with the Title: 7.5 Lessons... Wait! What's a half lessons. That's the poke. The pour is a flow of knowledge that can cling to the freshly poked curiosity. An example from p.10 - there is no why for our brains, "no why to evolution". Followed by a great passage on allostatis and what the brain is good for ... "so you can perform nature's most vital task: passing your genes to the next generation." If that is not WHY, then I am a monkey's uncle.
7.5 Lessons has a more developed metaphor for body budgeting (allostatis) evolving to an accounting department. The 1/2 lesson is that brain is not for thinking but for running our bodies. It is the accountant running our body.
p.50 "As information travels from the world into the newborn brain, some neurons fire together more frequently than others, causing gradual brain changes that we've called plasticity. These changes nudge the infant's brain toward higher complexity via two processes we'll call tuning and pruning."
Pruning Dendrites: Nice tree metaphor where the trunk is an axon and the bark is the myelin. We need to add a subway to this metaphor. Packets or info are gathered by the leaves, flow down the trunk, into the subway, ride to another arboretum, flow up the trunk to the branches and become neurotransmitters flowing to the surrounding dendrites.
p.61 "Childhood poverty is a huge waste of human opportunity" (early brain development is critical) Finlay's model of mammal brain development timeline.
The lesson on prediction was a little frustrating. Barrett understands this deeply, but, this rendition does not capture it. From previous book, HEAM: "Through prediction and correction, your brain continually creates and revises your mental model of the world. It's a huge ongoing simulation that constructs everything you perceive while determining how you act..."
The best nugget on prediction is not in the chapter, but on page 100 - "Your brain's predictions prepare your body for action and then contribute to what you sense and otherwise experience."
What happens when prediction overrules the senses?
p.71 hallucinations - "Most of the time when you look at cows, you see cows. But you've almost certainly had an experience ... where the information inside your head triumphs over the data from the outside world. ... 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. It's not the kind of hallucination that sends you to the hospital. It's an everyday kind of hallucination that creates all your experiences and guides all your actions. It's the normal way that your brain gives meaning to your sense data, and you're almost always unaware that it's happening."
p.77 prediction, autopilot, mindlessly eating licorice. Lot's of good info on prediction, but, no Prediction Error at all.
While the science is top notch and great, what is truly wonderful about this book is when Barrett "takes lab coat off". This is from the Social Brains chapter. (Shared gaze, etc. See Cozolino 2006)
p.96 - "Taking our species' interdependence seriously doesn't mean restricting rights. It can mean simply understanding the impact we have on one another. Each of us can be the kind of person who makes more deposits into other people's body budgets than withdrawals or the kind of person who is a drain on the health and welfare of those around us."
I have too many scribbles in the margins of the rest of the book to be able to transcribe it here and now. Scribbles in the margins indicate stuff worth going back to.
Humans' superpower is the construction of social reality, which is Barrett's bailiwick. I'd love to take her 5 C's - creativity, communications, copying, cooperation and (c)abstraction and compare them with Christakis's Social Suite, or perhaps the 8 C's of IFS.
p.100 - "We have learned that humankind has a single brain architecture a complex network and yet each individual brain tunes and prunes itself to its surroundings."
p.101 - "It's important for humans to have many kinds of minds, because variation is critical for the survival of a species. One of Charles Darwin's greatest insights was that variation is a prerequisite for natural selection to work." (my paraphrase: we need both of what John Stuart Mill would have called liberals & conservatives in our populations to survive as a species.)
I am an armchair neuroscientist that has read more than a few books on consciousness. Barrett never mentions consciousness, but if the metaphor for consciousness is a stream, she elucidates the properties of water and gravity, the flows and eddies, as well the grasses and rocks that shape the stream. Just wonderful.
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Jim H
3.0 out of 5 stars A Little UneasyReviewed in the United Kingdom on April 11, 2021
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This book has received a lot of praise, but I have reservations. It is quite easy to read and the author is clearly very well informed. But I am very unsure about the degree of support that the theory set out has amongst neuroscientists in general. Is the author making out the case for a theory that has a lot of support or very little? I don't know. The claim that our brains did not evolve because thinking - i.e. reasoning - has a big evolutionary advantage seems to me me very unlikely and I am not convinced by the author's argument.
Quite separately, I found the layout of the book unhelpful. It is necessary to read the 35 page appendix bit by bit as you go, but these notes are not referenced in the main text. I had to go through the main text and mark it up in pencil so I knew when to turn to the appendix. Tedious.
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Madman
3.0 out of 5 stars She’s just not a very good writer.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 20, 2021
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I heard her on Sam Harris’s podcast. Liked her, thought she was very interesting. But the book is a disappointment. Standard bad pop-sci shortcomings - e.g. unwieldy and unhelpful homely analogies instead of just describing the damn thing properly. Also, some of her big takes on the science are clearly non-mainstream. Which is fine, but she’s a bit off-hand withering of the mainstream, without being quite specific enough about what they’ve got wrong. Often, I suspect, it’s just a difference of emphasis or tone.
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J. Drew
5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating look at how our brains workReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 12, 2022
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This book about the brain includes a number of sessions about this subject that Lisa Barrett has presented and now written a book about. The book begins by talking about the popular idea of metaphors of the brain and exemplified in the chimp paradox whereby we think we have a lizard brain and then a cat brain and on top we have a human brain (all competing for one another - hence why your rational, outer brain says ‘just one more chocolate’ and your monkey brain has eaten the entire packet before you rational brain states ‘what the hell just happened’) but the book states this idea is wrong as we can see in many other animals that are mammals and have similar brain structure. Elephants have larger brains and owls and mice have smaller but they are all in context. The book then goes on to look at how the brain is structured and why it makes the decisions it makes.
- The book describes how the brain is a network of systems. It contains 128 billion brain neuron cells which communicate with different parts of the brain to create a whole single perception of everything we experience.
- The author explains how the neurons in the brain are constantly firing and behave in similar ways to planes in the sky constantly going between airports. Airports have many different functions, selling tickets and allowing planes to fly and take off and land as well as selling bad food. However there are also major hubs that can take on the vast majority of planes should one go down then this can disrupt the system. However the brain is complex and other systems will take over. Many different neurons will work in different ways to do the same task just does you might have different planes and pilots fly new from one place to another
- The third lesson is about how the interaction between the outside world and our brain forms in our skull and discusses how our brains evolved. For example horses come out into the world and within a few hours are able to walk but babies have to develop this skill over 12 months. If a baby's eyes are not exposed to the constant rays of light they will not develop and be able to focus on what they see and construct what they see in their brain. The same is true of many other experiences such as cuddling and skin to skin contact as well as holding a babies face close to yours so that they're at the right distance so they can see and mimic and learn
- The third chapter contains a fascinating description about how our brains begin to prune what they have seen and reduce connections in the brain - this is called pruning. One example of the babies are able to hear all sounds and then slowly the brain will filter out the one that it recognises as its own home language. It is also able to smell breastmilk which as soon as it's released from the mum's breast it will crawl and find its way towards just through smell. This is a chapter that is worth another read.
- It's also really important that babies get social contact and an experiment which occurred by chance was where babies were observed in Romanian orphanages, where they had many babies due to the government asking for more manpower and increases in the number of babies born in Romania. However many families couldn't afford these babies so they were placed in institutions and did not receive cuddles and hugs and skin to skin contact they were just merely fed. Many of these babies grew up damaged and stunted and with learning difficulties. It's an important example of the importance of social touch regarding our brain development. These examples of neglect have been seen in many other circumstances as well. And if babies are neglected they will grow up more prone to a range of medical problems such as diabetes and heart attacks as well as difficulties in forming social attachment with other people. Similar impact has been shown in experiments on attachment using monkees where they are where they were given a model that was made of metal would give milk and another pretend mother that was more like a teddy and these were the monkeys that were attracted to the most - rather than the pretend monkey who was shaped from metal but did offer food. Social interaction is really important from the moment we are born.
- The fourth lesson talks about how the brain is a prediction machine that predicts everything you're going to do next. The brain consists of neurochemicals and swirling electrical activity that makes sense of everything around it and gives it meaning. However it is also determined by memory and what it is already perceived an experienced to help it make sense of how the brain will wire and fire together to help us with the acts of living our life and being who we are and what we perceive and make sense - whether it be taste, vision, hearing, touch and smell.
- The fifth lesson talks about how our brains are social brains and that they are changed and develop through the interactions with others. Being in a relationship that can help you to live a longer life than one where you are alone.
- The brain is always looking for ways of saving energy and the metabolic cost that is required to run it. The average energy required to run a brain is equal to the amount that you might need to light a lightbulb as it is an incredibly efficient machine. However it is really important and there are lots of benefits to having others in your life to help you and support you and the brain needs other brains to develop and support it. People who are lonely will often die earlier and if they get an illness have less of a chance of recovery as those who are in relationships or have a close friend and even a pet. Even the words that people use can help to ensure support brains, or make us angry. When we are given a compliment we can feel good but when someone is threatening us we can also feel rage and anger. Words can impact our hormones and emotions. Words can change the physiology of how we feel by changing the hormones that control our heart rate and sending all sorts of hormones through the body to change how we feel and behave. Words are powerful.
- Lesson six is about how we evolved with many different types and kinds of mind and not just one. Our culture and society and the people we surround us will shape our brains and how brains evolve and our structure can be dependent on the culture and people that surround us. This can include the culture, religion and beliefs that make up different countries.
- There are many types of mind variation. For example a mind may be autistic or schizophrenia but also in less extreme cases minds can produce some people to be thoughtful and others to be more caring and empathetic what we need to do is embrace all these different kinds of minds because they are what helps humans to continue to develop a wide rang of skills on this planet. Having a wide range of minds means we can deal with a wide range of problems.
- Even though people around us will have different types of mind it's also important to be aware that we can change our own mind. This might be temporary either through drinking lots of coffee or and taking vitamins to stay up all night to revise for something or when we drink and become more sociable and find other people more attractive - we have altered the state of our own mind. We can also do this on longer terms for example going to a new country and exploring different cultures as well as learning something new which again changes the structure and way your mind behaves.
- Lesson seven is about how our brains create reality. The wavelength of light that bounces off something that we see and absorbs certain amounts of wavelengths that are then sent to our eyes and then evolve in our brain to create our perception of colour - this is created in the mind. The whole world is created as an illusion in our brains but this helps us to make sense of everything around us. Reality is an illusion created by our brains.
- We live in a world where we give meaning to pieces of paper and little bits of metal that we call money. It's all made up but we give it meaning and reality and we all get together to help us buy things and create things and be paid. Made up illusions we create and they then become real.
- With our brains being a prediction making machine we perceive wine that is more expensive is better than wine that is cheaper or real fair trade coffee tastes better than coffee that comes out of plain paper with no markings. We create this perception that changes how we feel towards something even though it is all made up. We create this reality through the five senses as described in this book.
- A short fascinating book about how our brains work - I really enjoyed reading it.
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Joe Bathelt
4.0 out of 5 stars Great introduction to modern brain scienceReviewed in the United Kingdom on June 6, 2021
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In this very readable book, renowned psychologist, Dr Lisa Feldman-Barrett, goes through takes the reader on a whistle-stop tour of the current understanding of the mind and brain. Each bite-size chapter provides a bitesize introduction to a particular aspect of cognitive neuroscience. Rather than listing facts, Dr Feldman-Barrett focuses on broad conceptual and theoretical insights that have emerged over the last decade. For instance, she discusses how and why the brain is more interested in predicting features of the environment rather than providing an accurate representation of the world. Even though the topics are complex and represent the current scientific consensus, the book is very readable and would even be suited for interested high-school students. The author achieves this feat by replacing jargon with well-crafted analogies and metaphors. In sum, I think that this book is a shining example of science writing that makes complex topics accessible for the public. I think that this book provides the best introduction for anyone with an interest in the mind and brain who has no prior education in this area.
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Jess
2.0 out of 5 stars There are better books about the brain you can spend your time readingReviewed in the United Kingdom on November 15, 2022
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With the broad variety of books available that discuss the brain, I’d highly recommend finding ones other than this one. The author’s writing style is unpleasantly arrogant and patronising throughout, berating popular and existing ideas about the brain for being metaphors (I would assume most people seeking books on the subject matter would be capable of realising that metaphorical descriptions are in fact metaphors and are not to be taken as gospel) whilst ironically employing her own metaphors that do much of the research she’s basing them on a disservice and even more bizarrely hold less bearing on the subject matter than the ones she is criticising. I’m unclear on where she stands on any of the subject matters she has discussed, dragging much of the history of her profession through the mud for being incorrect by modern standards without acknowledging that we wouldn’t have arrived at our current knowledge on the subject without the scientific enquiry that came before. I think there are better figures in this field that describe the brain more informatively than a book with content I’d expect to see in a high school textbook. As others have pointed out the notes at the end (which make up close to a third of the book) are not referenced throughout where needed so I didn’t bother reading them.
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G. C. Carter
5.0 out of 5 stars Provides insightful summary of new information how the evolution and function of the brainReviewed in the United States on February 4, 2021
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The book entitled: “Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain” by Lisa Feldman Barrett provided its greatest value to this reader by challenging things that I had previously been taught and knew or thought that I knew about the brain. This book provides another explanation of how and why the human brain operates that way that it does. The book is worth purchasing and reading. The author, Professor Barrett writes
“Animals had gobbled one another before, but now the eating was more purposeful. Hunting didn’t require a brain, but it was a big step toward developing one.
The emergence of predators during the Cambrian period transformed the planet into a more competitive and dangerous place. Both predators and prey evolved to sense more of the world around them. With the arrival of greater senses, the most critical question in existence became Is that blob in the distance good to eat, or will it eat me?
When it came to body budgeting, prediction beat reaction. A creature that prepared its movement before the predator struck was more likely to be around tomorrow than a creature that awaited a predator’s pounce. Creatures that predicted correctly most of the time, or made nonfatal mistakes and learned from them, did well. Those that frequently predicted poorly, missed threats, or false-alarmed about threats that never materialized didn’t do so well. They explored their environment less, foraged less, and were less likely to reproduce”
“Lesson No. 1 You Have One Brain (Not Three)
According to this evolutionary story, the human brain ended up with three layers—one for surviving, one for feeling, and one for thinking—an arrangement known as the triune brain. Fortunately, we don’t have to reconcile them, because one of them is wrong. The triune brain idea is one of the most successful and widespread errors in all of science.
Today, terms like lizard brain and limbic system run rampant through popular-science books and newspaper and magazine articles. … By the 1990s, experts had completely rejected the idea of a three-layered brain. It simply didn’t hold up. … scientists have learned that evolution does not add layers to brain anatomy like geological layers of sedimentary rock. But human brains are obviously different from rat brains, so how exactly did our brains come to differ if not by adding layers?”
Moreover, Professor Barrett writes: “Human brains did not emerge from reptile brains by evolving extra parts for emotion and rationality. Instead, something more interesting happened.” And goes on to state: “… your misnamed neocortex is not a new part; … Anything you read or hear that proclaims the human neocortex, cerebral cortex, or prefrontal cortex to be the root of rationality, or says that the frontal lobe regulates so-called emotional brain areas to keep irrational behavior in check, is simply outdated or woefully incomplete. The triune brain idea and its epic battle between emotion, instinct, and rationality is a modern myth.” And “Your brain is not more evolved than a rat or lizard brain, just differently evolved. … Why do expensive executive-training courses teach CEOs to get a grip on their lizard brains if experts in brain evolution dismissed such ideas decades ago?”
Professor Barrett writes: “Your brain does not “store” memories like computer files to be retrieved and opened later. … what kind of brain do we actually have … Your brain is a network—a collection of parts that are connected to function as a single unit. … Your brain, in turn, is a network of 128 billion neurons connected as a single, massive, and flexible structure.”
The author goes on to write: “Your brain network is organized in much the same way. Its neurons are grouped into clusters that are like airports. … Brain hubs, like airport hubs, make a complicated system efficient. They allow most neurons to participate globally even as they focus more locally. Hubs form the backbone of communication throughout the brain.”
Professor Barrett explains: “Your brain network is not static—it changes continuously. … These network changes happen instantaneously and continually, even as your physical brain structure seems unchanged. In addition, some of these chemicals, such as serotonin and dopamine, can also act on other neurotransmitters to dial up or dial down their effects. … changes are examples of what scientists call plasticity, and they occur throughout your life.” And goes on to state: “A brain doesn’t store memories like files in a computer—it reconstructs them on demand with electricity and swirling chemicals. We call this process remembering but it’s really assembling. … Brains of higher complexity are also more creative. A complex brain can combine past experiences in new ways to deal with things that it has never encountered before; … The highly complex human brain isn’t a pinnacle of evolution, remember; it’s just well adapted to the environments we inhabit.”
In lesson 3, the author explains: “Many animals emerge from the egg or womb with brains that are more fully wired to control their bodies, but little human brains … don’t take on their full adult structure and function until they finish their principal wiring, a process that takes about twenty-five years. …”
On nature vs. nurture, Professor Barrett writes: “Scholars usually discuss this issue in terms of nature versus nurture—which aspects of humanity are built into our genes before birth and which ones we learn from our culture. … so deeply entwined that it’s unhelpful to call them separate names like nature and nurture.” And goes on to provide tantalizing insight into new research, stating: “… To make matters even stranger, a baby’s body requires some additional genes that sneak in from the outside world. These tiny visitors travel inside of bacteria and other critters and affect the brain in ways that scientists are only beginning to understand.” Moreover, Professor Barrett reminds the reader: “… As information travels from the world into the newborn brain, some neurons fire together more frequently than others, causing gradual brain changes that we’ve called plasticity. These changes nudge the infant’s brain toward higher complexity via two processes we’ll call tuning and pruning. … Tuning means strengthening the connections between neurons, … Meanwhile, less-used connections weaken and die off. This is the process of pruning… is critical in a developing brain, because little humans are born with many more connections than they will ultimately use.”
As to language development, Professor Barrett writes: “When tested in a lab, newborns can distinguish a wide range of language sounds, including those that they don’t hear very often. But over time, tuning and pruning will wire the baby’s brain based on the vocal sounds he hears more regularly. Sounds that are frequent cause certain neural connections to be tuned, and the baby’s brain starts to treat those sounds as part of its niche. Sounds that are rare are treated as noise to be ignored, and eventually, related neural connections fall out of use and are pruned away. Scientists think this sort of pruning may be one reason why children have an easier time learning languages than adults do. Different spoken languages use different sets of sounds.”
With respect to early child development, consistent with other research, the author reminds the reader: “In the 1960s, the Communist government of Romania … ,… In some orphanages, babies were warehoused in rows of cribs, with little stimulation or social interaction. Nurses or caregivers would come in and feed them, change them, and put them back in the cribs. That was about it. Nobody cuddled these babies. No one played with them. No one conversed with or sang to them, or shared attention. They were ignored. As a consequence of this social neglect, the Romanian orphans grew up intellectually impaired. They had problems learning language. They had difficulty concentrating and resisting distractions, probably because nobody had shared attention with them, so their brains never developed the wiring for an effective spotlight. They also had trouble controlling themselves. … The scientific evidence is clear on this point. You can’t just feed and water babies and expect their brains to grow normally.”
Professor Barrett goes on to explain: “Each little brain becomes optimized for its particular environment, the one it developed in. Caregivers curate a baby’s physical and social niche, and the baby’s brain learns that niche. When the baby grows up, he perpetuates that niche by passing his culture to the next generation through his words and actions, wiring their brains in turn. This process, called cultural inheritance, is efficient and frugal because evolution doesn’t have to encode all our wiring instructions in genes.”
In Lesson No. 4 Your Brain Predicts (Almost) Everything You Do, Professor Barrett states: “Scientists have had hints for more than a century that brains are predicting organs, though we didn’t decipher those hints until recently. You might have heard of Ivan Pavlov, the nineteenth-century physiologist who famously taught his dogs to salivate upon hearing a sound (usually described as a bell, but it was really a ticking metronome). … Pavlov won a Nobel Prize for discovering this effect, which became known as Pavlovian or classical conditioning, but he didn’t realize that he was discovering how brains predict.”
The author goes on to explain, in a manner that is likely to have practical implications to things like police shooting actions to state in the case of a soldier predicting an enemy but faced with a non-combatant: “The soldier’s brain chose the other option, however; his brain stuck with its prediction in spite of the sense data from the world. This can happen for many reasons, one being that his brain predicted his life was on the line. Brains aren’t wired for accuracy. They’re wired to keep us alive. … You and I seem to sense first and act second. You see an enemy and then raise your rifle. But in your brain, sensing actually comes second. Your brain is wired to prepare for action first, like moving your index finger onto a trigger …”
In Lesson No. 5 Your Brain Secretly Works with Other Brains, Professor Barrett writes: “ How do the people around you influence your body budget and rewire your adult brain? Little by little, your brain becomes tuned and pruned as you interact with others. … Some brains are more attentive to the people around them, and others less so, but everybody has somebody … Being a social species has all sorts of advantages for us Homo sapiens. One advantage is that we live longer if we have close, supportive relationships with other people. … Another advantage of being a social species is that we do better at our jobs when we work with peers and managers whom we trust.
It’s metabolically costly for a brain to deal with things that are hard to predict. No wonder people create so-called echo chambers, surrounding themselves with news and views that reinforce what they already believe—it reduces the metabolic cost and unpleasantness of learning something new. Unfortunately, it also reduces the odds of learning something that might change a person’s mind.”
Professor Barrett goes on to write: “Humans are unique in the animal kingdom, however, because we also regulate each other with words. … Simply put, a long period of chronic stress can harm a human brain. Scientific studies are absolutely clear on this point. … The best thing for your nervous system is another human. The worst thing for your nervous system is also another human. … A more realistic approach to our dilemma, I think, at least in the United States, is to realize that freedom always comes with responsibility. We are free to speak and act, but we are not free from the consequences of what we say and do. We might not care about those consequences, or we might not agree that those consequences are justified, but they nonetheless have costs that we all pay. … The price of personal freedom is personal responsibility for your impact on others. The wiring of all of our brains guarantees it. … Taking our species’ interdependence seriously doesn’t mean restricting rights. It can mean simply understanding the impact we have on one another.” And “Like it or not, we influence the brains and bodies of those around us with our actions and words, and they return the favor.”
In Lesson No. 6 Brains Make More than One Kind of Mind, Professor Barrett writes: “ …you are from a Western culture, like I am, your mind has features called thoughts and emotions, and the two feel fundamentally different from each other. But people who grow up in Balinese culture, as well as in the Ilongot culture in the Philippines, do not experience what we Westerners call cognition and emotion as different kinds of events. They experience what we would call a blend of thinking and feeling, but to them it’s a single thing. … In short, a particular human brain in a particular human body, raised and wired in a particular culture, will produce a particular kind of mind. … It’s important for humans to have many kinds of minds, because variation is critical for the survival of a species. One of Charles Darwin’s greatest insights was that variation is a prerequisite for natural selection to work.”
Professor Barrett goes on to write: “So even when scientists do acknowledge that there are different kinds of minds, they try to tame the variation by organizing it into categories. They sort people into neat little boxes with labels. Some people are labeled as having a warm personality, and others are cold. Some people are more dominant and others more nurturing. Some cultures prioritize individuals over the group, while others do the opposite.” And goes on to write about personality testing stating: “You may have seen personality tests that collect information about you and assign you to a little box. A great example is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI, which sorts people into sixteen little boxes labeled with different personality types to classify you and supposedly help you get ahead in your career. Sadly, the MBTI’s scientific validity is pretty dubious. … Personally, I prefer the Hogwarts Sorting Test, which has only four boxes and is far more rigorous. “
In the final Lesson No. 7 Our Brains Can Create Reality, Professor Barrett discusses details of the brains five C’s: creativity, communication, copying, cooperation, and compression adding additional understanding of the brain.]
This reader found this book worth purchasing and worth reading but disappointing was that the references were not in the traditional and familiar form this reader is familiar with; in particular, instead of footnotes or endnotes with the references, the author stated: “As a professor, I usually include loads of scientific details in my writing, such as descriptions of studies and pointers to journal papers. For these informal essays, however, I’ve moved the full scientific references to my website, sevenandahalflessons.com.” However, when I went to that website, I found it difficult to navigate and apparently, one has to search out each noted reference slowly one at a time. Had the author provided “descriptions of studies and pointers to journal papers” in a more accessible fashion then reader’s confidence in the material likely would have been strengthened. Oddly, this was something new learned by this reader, namely the author explains that the brain predicts the future and then looks for data to corroborate what is expected rather than what many of us presumed, namely that we collect data and logically weigh the data before deciding. As the author, states: “All sorts of animals, including humans, somehow conjure up past experiences to prepare their bodies for action.” So this reader, from past experience, looked to the notes for references preparing to see the explicit references.
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YON - Jan C. Hardenbergh
5.0 out of 5 stars When Barrett "takes lab coat off", it is wonderful!Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2020
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7&1/2 Lessons is brilliant, thin, metaphor laden, rich, frustrating, sometimes overly professorial and truly wonderful. If you liked her earlier book, How Emotions are Made (HEAM), you will like this book, too! Although it is a completely difference book. If you are new to neuroscience, this is the perfect place to start. If you know too much, this book will rustle the leaves in your dendrites.
A novel feature of this book is that you can follow along with the website to see the notes and references without having to flip to the back notes section. The 36 pages of notes seems to have more exposition that the website, but the references are on the website. You can always go back to the notes. Also, 11 pages of index.
Barrett is a master of what I'll "poke & pour" storytelling, starting with the Title: 7.5 Lessons... Wait! What's a half lessons. That's the poke. The pour is a flow of knowledge that can cling to the freshly poked curiosity. An example from p.10 - there is no why for our brains, "no why to evolution". Followed by a great passage on allostatis and what the brain is good for ... "so you can perform nature's most vital task: passing your genes to the next generation." If that is not WHY, then I am a monkey's uncle.
7.5 Lessons has a more developed metaphor for body budgeting (allostatis) evolving to an accounting department. The 1/2 lesson is that brain is not for thinking but for running our bodies. It is the accountant running our body.
p.50 "As information travels from the world into the newborn brain, some neurons fire together more frequently than others, causing gradual brain changes that we've called plasticity. These changes nudge the infant's brain toward higher complexity via two processes we'll call tuning and pruning."
Pruning Dendrites: Nice tree metaphor where the trunk is an axon and the bark is the myelin. We need to add a subway to this metaphor. Packets or info are gathered by the leaves, flow down the trunk, into the subway, ride to another arboretum, flow up the trunk to the branches and become neurotransmitters flowing to the surrounding dendrites.
p.61 "Childhood poverty is a huge waste of human opportunity" (early brain development is critical) Finlay's model of mammal brain development timeline.
The lesson on prediction was a little frustrating. Barrett understands this deeply, but, this rendition does not capture it. From previous book, HEAM: "Through prediction and correction, your brain continually creates and revises your mental model of the world. It's a huge ongoing simulation that constructs everything you perceive while determining how you act..."
The best nugget on prediction is not in the chapter, but on page 100 - "Your brain's predictions prepare your body for action and then contribute to what you sense and otherwise experience."
What happens when prediction overrules the senses?
p.71 hallucinations - "Most of the time when you look at cows, you see cows. But you've almost certainly had an experience ... where the information inside your head triumphs over the data from the outside world. ... 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. It's not the kind of hallucination that sends you to the hospital. It's an everyday kind of hallucination that creates all your experiences and guides all your actions. It's the normal way that your brain gives meaning to your sense data, and you're almost always unaware that it's happening."
p.77 prediction, autopilot, mindlessly eating licorice. Lot's of good info on prediction, but, no Prediction Error at all.
While the science is top notch and great, what is truly wonderful about this book is when Barrett "takes lab coat off". This is from the Social Brains chapter. (Shared gaze, etc. See Cozolino 2006)
p.96 - "Taking our species' interdependence seriously doesn't mean restricting rights. It can mean simply understanding the impact we have on one another. Each of us can be the kind of person who makes more deposits into other people's body budgets than withdrawals or the kind of person who is a drain on the health and welfare of those around us."
I have too many scribbles in the margins of the rest of the book to be able to transcribe it here and now. Scribbles in the margins indicate stuff worth going back to.
Humans' superpower is the construction of social reality, which is Barrett's bailiwick. I'd love to take her 5 C's - creativity, communications, copying, cooperation and (c)abstraction and compare them with Christakis's Social Suite, or perhaps the 8 C's of IFS.
p.100 - "We have learned that humankind has a single brain architecture a complex network and yet each individual brain tunes and prunes itself to its surroundings."
p.101 - "It's important for humans to have many kinds of minds, because variation is critical for the survival of a species. One of Charles Darwin's greatest insights was that variation is a prerequisite for natural selection to work." (my paraphrase: we need both of what John Stuart Mill would have called liberals & conservatives in our populations to survive as a species.)
I am an armchair neuroscientist that has read more than a few books on consciousness. Barrett never mentions consciousness, but if the metaphor for consciousness is a stream, she elucidates the properties of water and gravity, the flows and eddies, as well the grasses and rocks that shape the stream. Just wonderful.
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崔明淑
[이토록 뜻밖의 뇌과학]
21세기의 뇌과학 최전선을 알 수 있는 책
<1장 요약>
-뇌에 관한 오랜 신화(삼위일체 뇌)
1 파충류의 뇌(뇌간 등) , 생존본능의뇌(호흡,맥박…)
2 포유류의 뇌(대뇌변연계),희노애락 감정의 뇌
3 인류의 뇌(신피질:전두전피질),사고 이성의 뇌
→진화에서 뇌가 복잡한 감각계와 운동계를 진화시키면서 신체 에너지를 예산관리하게 되었다. 이성이 동물적 충동과 감정을 누른다는 삼위일체 뇌는 서사(이성은 감정과 경쟁하지 않고 뇌내에서 다른 곳에 위치하는 것도 아니다. )
*3층구조의 뇌는 20세기 중반-폴 막크린
-1990년대부터 뇌전문가들은 완전부정 -뉴런분석결과
-인간의 4개의 뇌영역과 래트의 하나의 뇌영역->같은 유전자가 다수(역할의 재분배 가능성이 높음) —분자유전학으로 파충류나 포유류가 인간이 가진 것과 동종의 뉴런을 갖추고 있다는 것이 판명됨. (뇌가 같은 설계를 가지고 있을 가능성이 높음)
⭐️인간의 신피질,대뇌피질,전두전피질이 이성의 원천,전두엽이 감정뇌를 조절하여 비합리적 행동을 막는다는 것은 엉터리. 인간이 다른 동물에 비해 고도의 진화를 한 것이 아니라 다른 양태로 진화해 온 것에 불과함.
-그럼 “합리적”행동이란 무언가? —-사고는 합리적? 감정은 비합리적?
몸의 자원을 관리하는 차원에서 보면 합리성이란 자원의 소비와 저축을 통해 현재의 환경에서 번영하는 것. 합리적 행동이란 현재 상황에 타당한 신체예산의 투자를 의미.
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Top reviews from other countries
Jim H
3.0 out of 5 stars A Little UneasyReviewed in the United Kingdom on April 11, 2021
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This book has received a lot of praise, but I have reservations. It is quite easy to read and the author is clearly very well informed. But I am very unsure about the degree of support that the theory set out has amongst neuroscientists in general. Is the author making out the case for a theory that has a lot of support or very little? I don't know. The claim that our brains did not evolve because thinking - i.e. reasoning - has a big evolutionary advantage seems to me me very unlikely and I am not convinced by the author's argument.
Quite separately, I found the layout of the book unhelpful. It is necessary to read the 35 page appendix bit by bit as you go, but these notes are not referenced in the main text. I had to go through the main text and mark it up in pencil so I knew when to turn to the appendix. Tedious.
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Madman
3.0 out of 5 stars She’s just not a very good writer.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 20, 2021
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I heard her on Sam Harris’s podcast. Liked her, thought she was very interesting. But the book is a disappointment. Standard bad pop-sci shortcomings - e.g. unwieldy and unhelpful homely analogies instead of just describing the damn thing properly. Also, some of her big takes on the science are clearly non-mainstream. Which is fine, but she’s a bit off-hand withering of the mainstream, without being quite specific enough about what they’ve got wrong. Often, I suspect, it’s just a difference of emphasis or tone.
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J. Drew
5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating look at how our brains workReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 12, 2022
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This book about the brain includes a number of sessions about this subject that Lisa Barrett has presented and now written a book about. The book begins by talking about the popular idea of metaphors of the brain and exemplified in the chimp paradox whereby we think we have a lizard brain and then a cat brain and on top we have a human brain (all competing for one another - hence why your rational, outer brain says ‘just one more chocolate’ and your monkey brain has eaten the entire packet before you rational brain states ‘what the hell just happened’) but the book states this idea is wrong as we can see in many other animals that are mammals and have similar brain structure. Elephants have larger brains and owls and mice have smaller but they are all in context. The book then goes on to look at how the brain is structured and why it makes the decisions it makes.
- The book describes how the brain is a network of systems. It contains 128 billion brain neuron cells which communicate with different parts of the brain to create a whole single perception of everything we experience.
- The author explains how the neurons in the brain are constantly firing and behave in similar ways to planes in the sky constantly going between airports. Airports have many different functions, selling tickets and allowing planes to fly and take off and land as well as selling bad food. However there are also major hubs that can take on the vast majority of planes should one go down then this can disrupt the system. However the brain is complex and other systems will take over. Many different neurons will work in different ways to do the same task just does you might have different planes and pilots fly new from one place to another
- The third lesson is about how the interaction between the outside world and our brain forms in our skull and discusses how our brains evolved. For example horses come out into the world and within a few hours are able to walk but babies have to develop this skill over 12 months. If a baby's eyes are not exposed to the constant rays of light they will not develop and be able to focus on what they see and construct what they see in their brain. The same is true of many other experiences such as cuddling and skin to skin contact as well as holding a babies face close to yours so that they're at the right distance so they can see and mimic and learn
- The third chapter contains a fascinating description about how our brains begin to prune what they have seen and reduce connections in the brain - this is called pruning. One example of the babies are able to hear all sounds and then slowly the brain will filter out the one that it recognises as its own home language. It is also able to smell breastmilk which as soon as it's released from the mum's breast it will crawl and find its way towards just through smell. This is a chapter that is worth another read.
- It's also really important that babies get social contact and an experiment which occurred by chance was where babies were observed in Romanian orphanages, where they had many babies due to the government asking for more manpower and increases in the number of babies born in Romania. However many families couldn't afford these babies so they were placed in institutions and did not receive cuddles and hugs and skin to skin contact they were just merely fed. Many of these babies grew up damaged and stunted and with learning difficulties. It's an important example of the importance of social touch regarding our brain development. These examples of neglect have been seen in many other circumstances as well. And if babies are neglected they will grow up more prone to a range of medical problems such as diabetes and heart attacks as well as difficulties in forming social attachment with other people. Similar impact has been shown in experiments on attachment using monkees where they are where they were given a model that was made of metal would give milk and another pretend mother that was more like a teddy and these were the monkeys that were attracted to the most - rather than the pretend monkey who was shaped from metal but did offer food. Social interaction is really important from the moment we are born.
- The fourth lesson talks about how the brain is a prediction machine that predicts everything you're going to do next. The brain consists of neurochemicals and swirling electrical activity that makes sense of everything around it and gives it meaning. However it is also determined by memory and what it is already perceived an experienced to help it make sense of how the brain will wire and fire together to help us with the acts of living our life and being who we are and what we perceive and make sense - whether it be taste, vision, hearing, touch and smell.
- The fifth lesson talks about how our brains are social brains and that they are changed and develop through the interactions with others. Being in a relationship that can help you to live a longer life than one where you are alone.
- The brain is always looking for ways of saving energy and the metabolic cost that is required to run it. The average energy required to run a brain is equal to the amount that you might need to light a lightbulb as it is an incredibly efficient machine. However it is really important and there are lots of benefits to having others in your life to help you and support you and the brain needs other brains to develop and support it. People who are lonely will often die earlier and if they get an illness have less of a chance of recovery as those who are in relationships or have a close friend and even a pet. Even the words that people use can help to ensure support brains, or make us angry. When we are given a compliment we can feel good but when someone is threatening us we can also feel rage and anger. Words can impact our hormones and emotions. Words can change the physiology of how we feel by changing the hormones that control our heart rate and sending all sorts of hormones through the body to change how we feel and behave. Words are powerful.
- Lesson six is about how we evolved with many different types and kinds of mind and not just one. Our culture and society and the people we surround us will shape our brains and how brains evolve and our structure can be dependent on the culture and people that surround us. This can include the culture, religion and beliefs that make up different countries.
- There are many types of mind variation. For example a mind may be autistic or schizophrenia but also in less extreme cases minds can produce some people to be thoughtful and others to be more caring and empathetic what we need to do is embrace all these different kinds of minds because they are what helps humans to continue to develop a wide rang of skills on this planet. Having a wide range of minds means we can deal with a wide range of problems.
- Even though people around us will have different types of mind it's also important to be aware that we can change our own mind. This might be temporary either through drinking lots of coffee or and taking vitamins to stay up all night to revise for something or when we drink and become more sociable and find other people more attractive - we have altered the state of our own mind. We can also do this on longer terms for example going to a new country and exploring different cultures as well as learning something new which again changes the structure and way your mind behaves.
- Lesson seven is about how our brains create reality. The wavelength of light that bounces off something that we see and absorbs certain amounts of wavelengths that are then sent to our eyes and then evolve in our brain to create our perception of colour - this is created in the mind. The whole world is created as an illusion in our brains but this helps us to make sense of everything around us. Reality is an illusion created by our brains.
- We live in a world where we give meaning to pieces of paper and little bits of metal that we call money. It's all made up but we give it meaning and reality and we all get together to help us buy things and create things and be paid. Made up illusions we create and they then become real.
- With our brains being a prediction making machine we perceive wine that is more expensive is better than wine that is cheaper or real fair trade coffee tastes better than coffee that comes out of plain paper with no markings. We create this perception that changes how we feel towards something even though it is all made up. We create this reality through the five senses as described in this book.
- A short fascinating book about how our brains work - I really enjoyed reading it.
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Joe Bathelt
4.0 out of 5 stars Great introduction to modern brain scienceReviewed in the United Kingdom on June 6, 2021
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In this very readable book, renowned psychologist, Dr Lisa Feldman-Barrett, goes through takes the reader on a whistle-stop tour of the current understanding of the mind and brain. Each bite-size chapter provides a bitesize introduction to a particular aspect of cognitive neuroscience. Rather than listing facts, Dr Feldman-Barrett focuses on broad conceptual and theoretical insights that have emerged over the last decade. For instance, she discusses how and why the brain is more interested in predicting features of the environment rather than providing an accurate representation of the world. Even though the topics are complex and represent the current scientific consensus, the book is very readable and would even be suited for interested high-school students. The author achieves this feat by replacing jargon with well-crafted analogies and metaphors. In sum, I think that this book is a shining example of science writing that makes complex topics accessible for the public. I think that this book provides the best introduction for anyone with an interest in the mind and brain who has no prior education in this area.
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Jess
2.0 out of 5 stars There are better books about the brain you can spend your time readingReviewed in the United Kingdom on November 15, 2022
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With the broad variety of books available that discuss the brain, I’d highly recommend finding ones other than this one. The author’s writing style is unpleasantly arrogant and patronising throughout, berating popular and existing ideas about the brain for being metaphors (I would assume most people seeking books on the subject matter would be capable of realising that metaphorical descriptions are in fact metaphors and are not to be taken as gospel) whilst ironically employing her own metaphors that do much of the research she’s basing them on a disservice and even more bizarrely hold less bearing on the subject matter than the ones she is criticising. I’m unclear on where she stands on any of the subject matters she has discussed, dragging much of the history of her profession through the mud for being incorrect by modern standards without acknowledging that we wouldn’t have arrived at our current knowledge on the subject without the scientific enquiry that came before. I think there are better figures in this field that describe the brain more informatively than a book with content I’d expect to see in a high school textbook. As others have pointed out the notes at the end (which make up close to a third of the book) are not referenced throughout where needed so I didn’t bother reading them.
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Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain
by
Lisa Feldman Barrett
4.06 · Rating details · 4,145 ratings · 524 reviews
Seven short essays (plus a bite-sized story about how brains evolved) reveal lessons from neuroscience research. Questions like these in any order:
1 where brains came from
2 how they’re structured (and why it matters)
3 how yours works in tandem with other brains to create everything you experience
4 dismiss popular myths
5 idea of a “lizard brain”
6 the alleged battle between thoughts and emotions
7 between nature and nurture
1/2 to determine your behavior (less)
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Hardcover, 192 pages
Jan 22, 2022Petra wonders how to turn a lover into a 4ever bf rated it really liked it
Shelves: 2022-read, reviewed, 2022-reviews, psycho-neurology-crime
The book had some interesting things to say, but nothing that I hadn't read particularly unique, one passage did intrigue me though because it is so true. It is a collective agreement on how the world works, with disagreements and totally other visions too. But even those of us who come from societies that do not see the world as we do, say Amazonian tribes, or pre-colonization Maoris, can quite easily imagine this world and as with the Maoris, adapt to it and still see the world in their way. It is a long passage full of truisms, but I don't want to edit it as it reads rather well
Our Brains Can Create Reality
MOST OF YOUR LIFE takes place in a made-up world. You live in a city or town whose name and whose borders were made up by people. Your street address is spelled with letters and other symbols that were also made up by people. Every word in every book, including this one, uses those made-up symbols. You can acquire books and other goods with something called “money,” which is represented by pieces of paper, metal, and plastic and is also completely made up. Sometimes money is invisible, flowing along cables between computer servers or traveling through the air as electromagnetic waves over a Wi-Fi network. You can even trade invisible money for invisible things, like the right to board an airplane early or the privilege of having another human serve you.
You actively and willingly participate in this made-up world every day. It is real to you. It’s as real as your own name, which, by the way, was also made up by people.
We all live in a world of social reality that exists only inside our human brains. Nothing in physics or chemistry determines that you’re leaving the United States and entering Canada, or that an expanse of water has certain fishing rights, or that a specific arc of the Earth’s orbit around the sun is called January. These things are real to us anyway. Socially real.
The Earth itself, with its rocks and trees and deserts and oceans, is physical reality. Social reality means that we impose new functions on physical things, collectively. We agree, for example, that a particular chunk of Earth is a “country,” and we agree that a particular human is its “leader,” like a president or queen.3.5 stars, but it's nice writing gets it upgraded to a 4 (just), although truth be told, I did skim a bit.
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Jul 05, 2020NAT.orious reads ☾ rated it liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: netgalley, standalones, scientific-genius
3 STARS ★★★✩✩
This book is for you if… you’re not the kind of science reader that wants his texts to be overly sensational. You will still notice that the author tries to excite her readers with some magnificent facts.
⤐ Overall.
Disclaimer: I really want to be blown away by science books. I don't expect to be enlightened to the point of ascension, I just thoroughly enjoy having fun facts to randomly mention when I'm socialising. This book was not quite what I was looking for but still good enough for a couple of hours of scientific input.
Lisa mainly drew my attention to me how absolutely "pathetic" human infants are. While other species can walk within minutes of their birth and have fully developed brains, we cannot even control our own limbs. Even fully grown we are less capable of certain tasks than even simple bacteria.
I also learned that all creatures share the same basic construction plan for our brain but each with different components and individual proportions.
⤐ The structure is as follows.
THE HALF LESSON - Your Brain Is Not for Thinking
LESSON NO 1 - You Have One Brain (Not Three)
LESSON NO 2 - Your Brain Is a Network
LESSON NO 3 - Little Brains Wire Themselves to Their World
LESSON NO 4 - Your Brain Predicts (Almost) Everything You Do
LESSON NO 5 - Your Brain Secretly Works With Other Brains
LESSON NO 6 - Brains Make More than One Kind of Mind
LESSON NO 7 - Our Brains Can Create Reality
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Appendix: The Science Behind the Science
Index
Author's Note
_____________________
3 STARS. Decent read that I have neither strongly positive nor negative feelings about. Some thinks irked me and thus it does not qualify as exceptional.
_____________________
Many thanks to the author Lisa Feldman Barrett, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and NetGalley for providing me with this eArc in exchange for an honest review. (less)
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May 27, 2021Alice rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: non-fiction, read-in-2021, science
Really interesting!
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Nov 29, 2020Rita P rated it really liked it · review of another edition
This little gem rekindled my interest in non-fiction and was a pleasant science "snack" to finish the year (also one of the few times I read a book that was just published, as it was randomly picked up by my boyfriend in a bookstore).
Barrett explains some basic concepts about our brain and how it is responsible for human behavior in a very humorous tone, through a prose that is not only pleasant but also very easy to read.
That being said, this book feels sometimes too easy, because it is clearly aimed at layman confronted with the subject for the first time, which resulted, in my opinion, in too many repetitions of the same idea through different analogies, and in an overall "baby tone" that irritated me occasionally.
That plus the system chosen for the end notes (it can't be that hard or distracting for people to have footnote numbers in the text itself, can it) justifies my rating. But it does not stop me from recommending this book, especially since the author, a scientist, is not afraid of dabbling in political subjects directly related to the subject at hand, which I thought was commendable.
The 7 lessons go as follows, for anyone interested:
0) Half lesson, as the author called it: Your brain is not for thinking: Your brain main function is survival.
1) You have one brain (not three): The triune brain paradigm is, at this point, just a scientific myth (yes, those exist too)
2) Your brain is a network: No specific part of the brain houses specific functions, but the whole brain performs these functioning as a super evolved and flexible network
3) Little brains wire themselves to the world: Not surprisingly, babies' brain form themselves largely with the help of outside stimuli
4) Your brain predicts (almost) everything you do: Your brain functions not reactively, but predictively, contrary to what we might think (I love this idea, unknown to me before: it's like all of us carry a seer in the top of our head, predicting the future and reacting to it, similarly to the Oracle from the Matrix)
5) Your brain secretly works with other brains: We're cooperative animals in more than one way, and sometimes we are not even aware of how we influence one another
6) Brains make more than one kind of mind: There's no universal "human mind" type, as every brain is unique and complex enough to create completely different minds and personalities for every person
7) Our brains can create reality: Our brains are also so complex, namely because of their capacity to think in abstract terms, that we created social constructs which govern our every-day life, and that we treat as if they were as real as physical reality (money, corporations, etc.)
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Jan 06, 2022Camelia Rose rated it really liked it
Shelves: psychology-neuroscience, science
Seven and Half Lessons About The Brain is a short and delightful book on the new (and not so new) findings of human brain research. Sorry to disappoint you, but your brain (and mine) is not built for thinking. According to Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett, its purpose is to budget your energy and its ultimate goal is to make sure you survive long enough to pass on your genes. The idea of the triune brain is outdated. So, you don’t have a lizard brain, a mammalian brain and a human brain, just one human brain, which is a vast network of interconnected neurons. You are born with a brain that is much less wired to the world than the brains of other baby animals, which makes you more vulnerable but also gives you an advantage of better adaptation. Your brain predicts everything you do, just not so accurately. Your brain is not built for accuracy but for keeping you alive.
For better or for worse, we are social species and that means a lot to our brains. Words do hurt, physically. “The best thing for your nervous system is another human. The worst thing for your nervous system is also another human. This situation leads us to a fundamental dilemma of the human condition. Your brain needs other people in order to keep your body alive and healthy, and at the same time, many cultures strongly value individual rights and freedoms. Dependence and freedom are naturally in conflict. How, then, can we best respect and culminate individual rights when we are social animals who regulate one another’s nervous system to survive?”
The writing is clear and humorous. My youngest child who is in middle school came home one day with a personality test, so I showed him the following paragraph: “You may have seen personality tests that collect information about you and assign you to a little box. A great example is the Myers-Brigs Type Indicator, or MBTI, which sorts people into sixteen little boxes labeled with different personality types to classify you and supposedly help you get ahead in your career. Sadly, the MBTI’s scientific validity is pretty dubious. This test and its many cousins typically work by asking what you believe about yourself, which research suggests may have little to do with your actual behavior in daily life. Personally, I prefer the Hogwarts Sorting Test, which has only four boxes and is far more rigorous. (I’m a Ravenclaw.)” Needless to say, he prefers Hogwarts Sorting Hat too. (less)
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Jan 25, 2021Bob rated it it was amazing
Why this book. Selected by a reading/discussion book I’m in, as a good follow up to Descarte’s Error. One member of our group pointed us to a Lisa Feldman Barrett Ted Talk which impressed us all, then an interview with her on youtube, and as a group, we decided then to read this book. Good idea.
Summary in 3 sentences; Lisa Feldman Barrett begins with a brief explanation of the evolution of the brain from a mini-worm amphioxus 550 million years ago, through many evolutionary iterations, until one of evolution’s branches and sequels, led to the human brain. She then spends the next 7 1/2 chapters debunking myths about how the brain works, and instructing us in the fundamental biological processes that govern our cerebral functions. And she makes clear that understanding these functions and processes are key to understanding why we are like we are, why and how people interact with each other and their environments like they do, and she offers a few ideas for how we can use that understanding to take some steps that could help us improve our lives.
My impressions. A really well done overview of the role that our brain’s biology plays in how we think, behave, and live. It is a short (125 pages), easy, enjoyable read. Professor Barrett takes some of the cutting edge insights about the human brain and mind (they are not the same) and shares them with us in language and conceptual descriptions that are easily understandable and accessible to someone with a high school education or better, but not necessarily a strong (or any) background in neuroscience or biology. She distills the insights of neuroscience and biology about the brain into insights that are useful for the rest of us.
There is a lot to understand here – she presents her case simply and clearly, but the implications are mind bending. She makes clear that we ARE biological creatures and the biology of the brain that we are born with very much influences how we perceive ourselves, the world, our relationships with others, and how we live. That is such an important insight – and I’m not even altogether sure what to do with it. This book is a great primer on the brain and catalyst for reflection – as I try to understand how these insights should change and enhance my understanding of my own potential, my relationships to the people in my life and my environment, my “spirituality,” my moods, how I live. Rereading my review of Sam Harris’s book Waking Up tells me that Waking Up would be a good companion book to 7 1/2 Lessons.
A few of the Key insights I got from the book:
Body Budget. A new concept for me, that makes sense. One of the brain’s key functions is to manage what she call the “body budget” and the brain spends or saves our mental and physical energy, similarly to how we spend and save money.
Like a muscle, we keep our brains healthy by challenging them – this develops and strengthens neuro-networks, which if not used, atrophy. Novelty, facing new challenges, learning new things strengthens the brain and its neuro-networks. The brain, like one’s physical muscles, is a “use it or lose it” organ. But a constant diet of novelty and “resilience-building” experiences without adequate rest and recuperation can create a chronic stress that is damaging to the brain.
I kinda already knew this (from reading Descarte’s Error,) but LFB reinforces the point in terms that are easier for me to digest: that the brain is a complex network of inter-dependent parts that work together in mysterious ways to give us our experience, AND the rest of the body is in on the conspiracy, sending and receiving signals that are outside our consciousness.
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A brief summary of the 7 1/2 lessons – each Lesson gets its own chapter.
The Half-Lesson – your brain is not for thinking: this chapter walks us thru how the brain has evolved over the last half billion years. She debunks the myth that our brain is for thinking – no, she says, its for optimizing our adaptation to our environment to help us better survive and pass our genes on to the next generation.
Lesson 1: You have one brain, (not three) This chapter debunks the mythology of many metaphors about the brain.
Lesson 2: Your Brain is a network: This chapter like the others elaborates on its title. She describes the “network” as integrated, functioning as a single whole, and is not separate sections functioning independently.
Lesson 3: Little Brains wire themselves to their world: This chapter is about the developing brain of the baby and child. Her main point is in the title – the brain adapts itself – wires’ itself – to the world it finds itself in.
Lesson 4: Your brain predicts (almost) everything you do: What we see, feel do in any situation is usually a result of predictions that our brain makes as a result of past experience.
Lesson 5: Your brain secretly works with other brains: We know that we are social animals but this chapter reinforces how our social interactions actually “tune and prune” our brains and the various manifestations of this “herd instinct” we have which is built into our DNA. We adapt ourselves unconsciously in many ways to the social environment we live in, even mirroring what we see, because we need and find a connection to other people in order to live. This behavior is “choreographed” by our brains, outside of our daily awareness.
Lesson 6; Brains Make More than One Kind of Mind: Interesting chapter in that it goes into the difference between “brain” and “mind.” She tells us that “…a particular human brain in a particular human body, raised and wired in a particular culture, will produce a particular kind of mind….We come into the world with a basic brain plan that can be wired in a variety of ways to construct different kinds of minds.”
Lesson 7: Our brains can create reality: “We live in a world of social reality that exists only inside our human brains.”p111 “Social Reality” is unique to humans and she attributes this reality to the 5 Cs: Creativity, Communication, Copying, Cooperation, Compression.
Epilogue: The Epilogue is a brief (2 page) overview, beginning with a list of 7 misunderstandings that most people have about themselves and “reality” based on misunderstanding of how the brain functions. She concludes that there is much still to learn about the brain. But first, we must understand that the structure and functions of the brain itself are the source of our human strengths and foibles, and, as she concludes, are what “make us simply, imperfectly, gloriously human.” p125.
If you would like to read my complete review of this book go to: https://bobsbeenreading.wordpress.com... (less)
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Dec 17, 2021Nazr. ☆ rated it it was amazing
Shelves: 2021-léktur, sains-matematika, tresna-sukma-manira, b-inggeris, 5-kartika-x-fiksi, narasumber-rujukan
This book is probably too simplistic for those science-y people, but I am not one of them, so I gave it ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐. Informative, brilliant and entertaining. Also witty.
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Apr 16, 2021Peter Tillman rated it really liked it
Shelves: sci-tech, reread-list, at-slo-paso-bg-pa, on-reserve
A really good popular-neurology book, a topic I usually struggle with. Dr. Barrett writes with unusual clarity, paring down to the essentials for us to understand the human brain. Here's the short review to start with, at Kirkus: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re...
From my sparse notes:
Tuning and pruning: a vital part of the development of young brains. Tuning is what happens to frequently-used neurons: they are better-connected and more efficient than seldom-used ones. There is a "use it or lose it" process in human brains: unused neurons wither and are removed, saving the high metabolic cost of keeping them. A healthy child needs an active care-giver, usually the parents. Orphans who are just "warehoused" are badly damaged.
And here's a good longer review that goes into more detail: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Excerpt: .... the structure and functions of the brain itself are the source of our human strengths and foibles, and, as she concludes, are what “make us simply, imperfectly, gloriously human.”
A first-rate book, well-written and delightfully brief. Highly recommended. (less)
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Nov 16, 2021Muhip Tezcan rated it it was amazing
Shelves: neuroscience, bilim
This can be a great start for anyone interested in the latest paradigms in neuroscience. Even though the ideas presented here are not intuitive at all, 7.5 Lessons About The Brain is easy to read and quite entertaining.
Lisa Feldman Barrett does well in explaining her current views about the brain, backed by neuroscience and shared by many others in the field (though not all). I would recommend reading the appendix as well, since it talks more about what ideas are commonly accepted vs which are more speculative, which may not be easy to see at a first glance reading the rest of the book.
It's easy to sum up the content of the book since it is organized in "lessons", the first one being the half lesson which lays the foundation for the rest:
1. Your Brain is not For Thinking
In the first chapter which makes up the "half lesson", the author talks about the evolution of the brain and thus lays the framework for the rest of the book: The brain evolved in order to keep the body alive and able to reproduce. Its main function is not to think, feel, dream etc. but to keep your body functioning as well as possible.
2. You have One Brain (Not Three)
Here Barrett presents her convincing arguments against the triune brain idea, which oversimplifies the functions of the brain and says it is made up of three evolutionary layers: the ancient, reptile brain that works with instinct; the mammalian brain which works with emotions; and the human brain or neocortex, which is supposedly responsible for rational thought and said to be superior to others. However, this idea is outdated and is just wrong: all mammals and share the same biological outprint for the brain. The genes in the cortex are not "newer" than the ones in the other regions and humans are not the only animals with a large cortex. We cannot single out the cortex or deeper parts of the brain when it comes to cognition, learning, social thinking etc. This ties in nicely to the next chapter, which is:
3. Your Brain is a Network
The brain does not consist of clearly defined regions that have specialized functions coming together like lego blocks. Metaphors like left brain being more rational and analytical while the right brain being more imaginative or creative, or Daniel Kahneman's System 1 vs System 2 thinking are just metaphors for different modes of brain functioning and do not really correspond to different regions in the brain. The brain has many networks that sometimes overlap, and is in itself a network of networks.
4. Little Brains Wire Themselves to Their World
Humans are born early and the brain's wiring keeps changing in the early years. It is overly connected than usual and some connections are lost while others are strengthened throughout the years. The number one factor in determining which connections are lost and which are strengthened is the baby's social reality: the bonding with her mother, its immediate environment, the sensory stimuli it receives etc. This chapter also explains that poverty and isolation has serious long-term effects on the brain and the person's health in general.
5. Your Brain Predicts (Almost) Everything You Do
This chapter focuses on the predicting brain idea. The idea that the brain creates a model of the world based on past experience and predicts pretty much everything before it happens, rather than merely reacting to it. This is similar to the ideas presented in Anil Seth's "reality as a controlled hallucination" TED talk, or David Eagleman's Incognito, as well as the author's previous book, How Emotions are Made.
6. Your Brain Secretly Works with Other Brains
We learn from each other since infancy. And this learning is not just learning facts, we construct our entire reality based on the social input we receive. We also regulate each other's "body budgets" by our words and actions.
7. Brains Make More than One Kind of Mind
There are almost no universal, innate features when it comes to the mind. Cultural norms, traditions, our social reality define everything from food habits to how we perceive emotions and thoughts. Variation is the norm. This increases our chances as a species to survive and thrive in different environments.
8. Our Brains can Create Reality
Our reality is mostly a social reality: We create meaning together with other people, we wire each other's brains and regulate each other's well-being via social communication, teaching and learning. We give different meanings to objects and events, make up concepts such as money and countries which don't exist in the "physical world".
This chapter sums up the ideas presented about social reality, plasticity, predicting brain and talks about the ethical conclusions we can draw from these ideas. Our minds are products of our own culture and experiences, but we are not mere machines reacting to everything. We have the choice to change our predictions and behave differently in the future. (less)
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May 16, 2021Elentarri rated it it was ok
Shelves: science-general
I was expecting to learn something new, but didn't. This book is superficial, overly simplistic, tedious, and is peppered with the author's political opinions. My brain kept trying to skim over huge swaths of this book. (less)
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Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain
by
Lisa Feldman Barrett
4.06 · Rating details · 4,145 ratings · 524 reviews
Seven short essays (plus a bite-sized story about how brains evolved) reveal lessons from neuroscience research. Questions like these in any order:
1 where brains came from
2 how they’re structured (and why it matters)
3 how yours works in tandem with other brains to create everything you experience
4 dismiss popular myths
5 idea of a “lizard brain”
6 the alleged battle between thoughts and emotions
7 between nature and nurture
1/2 to determine your behavior (less)
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Hardcover, 192 pages
Jan 22, 2022Petra wonders how to turn a lover into a 4ever bf rated it really liked it
Shelves: 2022-read, reviewed, 2022-reviews, psycho-neurology-crime
The book had some interesting things to say, but nothing that I hadn't read particularly unique, one passage did intrigue me though because it is so true. It is a collective agreement on how the world works, with disagreements and totally other visions too. But even those of us who come from societies that do not see the world as we do, say Amazonian tribes, or pre-colonization Maoris, can quite easily imagine this world and as with the Maoris, adapt to it and still see the world in their way. It is a long passage full of truisms, but I don't want to edit it as it reads rather well
Our Brains Can Create Reality
MOST OF YOUR LIFE takes place in a made-up world. You live in a city or town whose name and whose borders were made up by people. Your street address is spelled with letters and other symbols that were also made up by people. Every word in every book, including this one, uses those made-up symbols. You can acquire books and other goods with something called “money,” which is represented by pieces of paper, metal, and plastic and is also completely made up. Sometimes money is invisible, flowing along cables between computer servers or traveling through the air as electromagnetic waves over a Wi-Fi network. You can even trade invisible money for invisible things, like the right to board an airplane early or the privilege of having another human serve you.
You actively and willingly participate in this made-up world every day. It is real to you. It’s as real as your own name, which, by the way, was also made up by people.
We all live in a world of social reality that exists only inside our human brains. Nothing in physics or chemistry determines that you’re leaving the United States and entering Canada, or that an expanse of water has certain fishing rights, or that a specific arc of the Earth’s orbit around the sun is called January. These things are real to us anyway. Socially real.
The Earth itself, with its rocks and trees and deserts and oceans, is physical reality. Social reality means that we impose new functions on physical things, collectively. We agree, for example, that a particular chunk of Earth is a “country,” and we agree that a particular human is its “leader,” like a president or queen.3.5 stars, but it's nice writing gets it upgraded to a 4 (just), although truth be told, I did skim a bit.
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Jul 05, 2020NAT.orious reads ☾ rated it liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: netgalley, standalones, scientific-genius
3 STARS ★★★✩✩
This book is for you if… you’re not the kind of science reader that wants his texts to be overly sensational. You will still notice that the author tries to excite her readers with some magnificent facts.
⤐ Overall.
Disclaimer: I really want to be blown away by science books. I don't expect to be enlightened to the point of ascension, I just thoroughly enjoy having fun facts to randomly mention when I'm socialising. This book was not quite what I was looking for but still good enough for a couple of hours of scientific input.
Lisa mainly drew my attention to me how absolutely "pathetic" human infants are. While other species can walk within minutes of their birth and have fully developed brains, we cannot even control our own limbs. Even fully grown we are less capable of certain tasks than even simple bacteria.
I also learned that all creatures share the same basic construction plan for our brain but each with different components and individual proportions.
⤐ The structure is as follows.
THE HALF LESSON - Your Brain Is Not for Thinking
LESSON NO 1 - You Have One Brain (Not Three)
LESSON NO 2 - Your Brain Is a Network
LESSON NO 3 - Little Brains Wire Themselves to Their World
LESSON NO 4 - Your Brain Predicts (Almost) Everything You Do
LESSON NO 5 - Your Brain Secretly Works With Other Brains
LESSON NO 6 - Brains Make More than One Kind of Mind
LESSON NO 7 - Our Brains Can Create Reality
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Appendix: The Science Behind the Science
Index
Author's Note
_____________________
3 STARS. Decent read that I have neither strongly positive nor negative feelings about. Some thinks irked me and thus it does not qualify as exceptional.
_____________________
Many thanks to the author Lisa Feldman Barrett, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and NetGalley for providing me with this eArc in exchange for an honest review. (less)
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May 27, 2021Alice rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: non-fiction, read-in-2021, science
Really interesting!
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Nov 29, 2020Rita P rated it really liked it · review of another edition
This little gem rekindled my interest in non-fiction and was a pleasant science "snack" to finish the year (also one of the few times I read a book that was just published, as it was randomly picked up by my boyfriend in a bookstore).
Barrett explains some basic concepts about our brain and how it is responsible for human behavior in a very humorous tone, through a prose that is not only pleasant but also very easy to read.
That being said, this book feels sometimes too easy, because it is clearly aimed at layman confronted with the subject for the first time, which resulted, in my opinion, in too many repetitions of the same idea through different analogies, and in an overall "baby tone" that irritated me occasionally.
That plus the system chosen for the end notes (it can't be that hard or distracting for people to have footnote numbers in the text itself, can it) justifies my rating. But it does not stop me from recommending this book, especially since the author, a scientist, is not afraid of dabbling in political subjects directly related to the subject at hand, which I thought was commendable.
The 7 lessons go as follows, for anyone interested:
0) Half lesson, as the author called it: Your brain is not for thinking: Your brain main function is survival.
1) You have one brain (not three): The triune brain paradigm is, at this point, just a scientific myth (yes, those exist too)
2) Your brain is a network: No specific part of the brain houses specific functions, but the whole brain performs these functioning as a super evolved and flexible network
3) Little brains wire themselves to the world: Not surprisingly, babies' brain form themselves largely with the help of outside stimuli
4) Your brain predicts (almost) everything you do: Your brain functions not reactively, but predictively, contrary to what we might think (I love this idea, unknown to me before: it's like all of us carry a seer in the top of our head, predicting the future and reacting to it, similarly to the Oracle from the Matrix)
5) Your brain secretly works with other brains: We're cooperative animals in more than one way, and sometimes we are not even aware of how we influence one another
6) Brains make more than one kind of mind: There's no universal "human mind" type, as every brain is unique and complex enough to create completely different minds and personalities for every person
7) Our brains can create reality: Our brains are also so complex, namely because of their capacity to think in abstract terms, that we created social constructs which govern our every-day life, and that we treat as if they were as real as physical reality (money, corporations, etc.)
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Jan 06, 2022Camelia Rose rated it really liked it
Shelves: psychology-neuroscience, science
Seven and Half Lessons About The Brain is a short and delightful book on the new (and not so new) findings of human brain research. Sorry to disappoint you, but your brain (and mine) is not built for thinking. According to Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett, its purpose is to budget your energy and its ultimate goal is to make sure you survive long enough to pass on your genes. The idea of the triune brain is outdated. So, you don’t have a lizard brain, a mammalian brain and a human brain, just one human brain, which is a vast network of interconnected neurons. You are born with a brain that is much less wired to the world than the brains of other baby animals, which makes you more vulnerable but also gives you an advantage of better adaptation. Your brain predicts everything you do, just not so accurately. Your brain is not built for accuracy but for keeping you alive.
For better or for worse, we are social species and that means a lot to our brains. Words do hurt, physically. “The best thing for your nervous system is another human. The worst thing for your nervous system is also another human. This situation leads us to a fundamental dilemma of the human condition. Your brain needs other people in order to keep your body alive and healthy, and at the same time, many cultures strongly value individual rights and freedoms. Dependence and freedom are naturally in conflict. How, then, can we best respect and culminate individual rights when we are social animals who regulate one another’s nervous system to survive?”
The writing is clear and humorous. My youngest child who is in middle school came home one day with a personality test, so I showed him the following paragraph: “You may have seen personality tests that collect information about you and assign you to a little box. A great example is the Myers-Brigs Type Indicator, or MBTI, which sorts people into sixteen little boxes labeled with different personality types to classify you and supposedly help you get ahead in your career. Sadly, the MBTI’s scientific validity is pretty dubious. This test and its many cousins typically work by asking what you believe about yourself, which research suggests may have little to do with your actual behavior in daily life. Personally, I prefer the Hogwarts Sorting Test, which has only four boxes and is far more rigorous. (I’m a Ravenclaw.)” Needless to say, he prefers Hogwarts Sorting Hat too. (less)
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Jan 25, 2021Bob rated it it was amazing
Why this book. Selected by a reading/discussion book I’m in, as a good follow up to Descarte’s Error. One member of our group pointed us to a Lisa Feldman Barrett Ted Talk which impressed us all, then an interview with her on youtube, and as a group, we decided then to read this book. Good idea.
Summary in 3 sentences; Lisa Feldman Barrett begins with a brief explanation of the evolution of the brain from a mini-worm amphioxus 550 million years ago, through many evolutionary iterations, until one of evolution’s branches and sequels, led to the human brain. She then spends the next 7 1/2 chapters debunking myths about how the brain works, and instructing us in the fundamental biological processes that govern our cerebral functions. And she makes clear that understanding these functions and processes are key to understanding why we are like we are, why and how people interact with each other and their environments like they do, and she offers a few ideas for how we can use that understanding to take some steps that could help us improve our lives.
My impressions. A really well done overview of the role that our brain’s biology plays in how we think, behave, and live. It is a short (125 pages), easy, enjoyable read. Professor Barrett takes some of the cutting edge insights about the human brain and mind (they are not the same) and shares them with us in language and conceptual descriptions that are easily understandable and accessible to someone with a high school education or better, but not necessarily a strong (or any) background in neuroscience or biology. She distills the insights of neuroscience and biology about the brain into insights that are useful for the rest of us.
There is a lot to understand here – she presents her case simply and clearly, but the implications are mind bending. She makes clear that we ARE biological creatures and the biology of the brain that we are born with very much influences how we perceive ourselves, the world, our relationships with others, and how we live. That is such an important insight – and I’m not even altogether sure what to do with it. This book is a great primer on the brain and catalyst for reflection – as I try to understand how these insights should change and enhance my understanding of my own potential, my relationships to the people in my life and my environment, my “spirituality,” my moods, how I live. Rereading my review of Sam Harris’s book Waking Up tells me that Waking Up would be a good companion book to 7 1/2 Lessons.
A few of the Key insights I got from the book:
Body Budget. A new concept for me, that makes sense. One of the brain’s key functions is to manage what she call the “body budget” and the brain spends or saves our mental and physical energy, similarly to how we spend and save money.
Like a muscle, we keep our brains healthy by challenging them – this develops and strengthens neuro-networks, which if not used, atrophy. Novelty, facing new challenges, learning new things strengthens the brain and its neuro-networks. The brain, like one’s physical muscles, is a “use it or lose it” organ. But a constant diet of novelty and “resilience-building” experiences without adequate rest and recuperation can create a chronic stress that is damaging to the brain.
I kinda already knew this (from reading Descarte’s Error,) but LFB reinforces the point in terms that are easier for me to digest: that the brain is a complex network of inter-dependent parts that work together in mysterious ways to give us our experience, AND the rest of the body is in on the conspiracy, sending and receiving signals that are outside our consciousness.
——-
A brief summary of the 7 1/2 lessons – each Lesson gets its own chapter.
The Half-Lesson – your brain is not for thinking: this chapter walks us thru how the brain has evolved over the last half billion years. She debunks the myth that our brain is for thinking – no, she says, its for optimizing our adaptation to our environment to help us better survive and pass our genes on to the next generation.
Lesson 1: You have one brain, (not three) This chapter debunks the mythology of many metaphors about the brain.
Lesson 2: Your Brain is a network: This chapter like the others elaborates on its title. She describes the “network” as integrated, functioning as a single whole, and is not separate sections functioning independently.
Lesson 3: Little Brains wire themselves to their world: This chapter is about the developing brain of the baby and child. Her main point is in the title – the brain adapts itself – wires’ itself – to the world it finds itself in.
Lesson 4: Your brain predicts (almost) everything you do: What we see, feel do in any situation is usually a result of predictions that our brain makes as a result of past experience.
Lesson 5: Your brain secretly works with other brains: We know that we are social animals but this chapter reinforces how our social interactions actually “tune and prune” our brains and the various manifestations of this “herd instinct” we have which is built into our DNA. We adapt ourselves unconsciously in many ways to the social environment we live in, even mirroring what we see, because we need and find a connection to other people in order to live. This behavior is “choreographed” by our brains, outside of our daily awareness.
Lesson 6; Brains Make More than One Kind of Mind: Interesting chapter in that it goes into the difference between “brain” and “mind.” She tells us that “…a particular human brain in a particular human body, raised and wired in a particular culture, will produce a particular kind of mind….We come into the world with a basic brain plan that can be wired in a variety of ways to construct different kinds of minds.”
Lesson 7: Our brains can create reality: “We live in a world of social reality that exists only inside our human brains.”p111 “Social Reality” is unique to humans and she attributes this reality to the 5 Cs: Creativity, Communication, Copying, Cooperation, Compression.
Epilogue: The Epilogue is a brief (2 page) overview, beginning with a list of 7 misunderstandings that most people have about themselves and “reality” based on misunderstanding of how the brain functions. She concludes that there is much still to learn about the brain. But first, we must understand that the structure and functions of the brain itself are the source of our human strengths and foibles, and, as she concludes, are what “make us simply, imperfectly, gloriously human.” p125.
If you would like to read my complete review of this book go to: https://bobsbeenreading.wordpress.com... (less)
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Dec 17, 2021Nazr. ☆ rated it it was amazing
Shelves: 2021-léktur, sains-matematika, tresna-sukma-manira, b-inggeris, 5-kartika-x-fiksi, narasumber-rujukan
This book is probably too simplistic for those science-y people, but I am not one of them, so I gave it ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐. Informative, brilliant and entertaining. Also witty.
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Apr 16, 2021Peter Tillman rated it really liked it
Shelves: sci-tech, reread-list, at-slo-paso-bg-pa, on-reserve
A really good popular-neurology book, a topic I usually struggle with. Dr. Barrett writes with unusual clarity, paring down to the essentials for us to understand the human brain. Here's the short review to start with, at Kirkus: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re...
From my sparse notes:
Tuning and pruning: a vital part of the development of young brains. Tuning is what happens to frequently-used neurons: they are better-connected and more efficient than seldom-used ones. There is a "use it or lose it" process in human brains: unused neurons wither and are removed, saving the high metabolic cost of keeping them. A healthy child needs an active care-giver, usually the parents. Orphans who are just "warehoused" are badly damaged.
And here's a good longer review that goes into more detail: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Excerpt: .... the structure and functions of the brain itself are the source of our human strengths and foibles, and, as she concludes, are what “make us simply, imperfectly, gloriously human.”
A first-rate book, well-written and delightfully brief. Highly recommended. (less)
flag10 likes · Like · comment · see review
Nov 16, 2021Muhip Tezcan rated it it was amazing
Shelves: neuroscience, bilim
This can be a great start for anyone interested in the latest paradigms in neuroscience. Even though the ideas presented here are not intuitive at all, 7.5 Lessons About The Brain is easy to read and quite entertaining.
Lisa Feldman Barrett does well in explaining her current views about the brain, backed by neuroscience and shared by many others in the field (though not all). I would recommend reading the appendix as well, since it talks more about what ideas are commonly accepted vs which are more speculative, which may not be easy to see at a first glance reading the rest of the book.
It's easy to sum up the content of the book since it is organized in "lessons", the first one being the half lesson which lays the foundation for the rest:
1. Your Brain is not For Thinking
In the first chapter which makes up the "half lesson", the author talks about the evolution of the brain and thus lays the framework for the rest of the book: The brain evolved in order to keep the body alive and able to reproduce. Its main function is not to think, feel, dream etc. but to keep your body functioning as well as possible.
2. You have One Brain (Not Three)
Here Barrett presents her convincing arguments against the triune brain idea, which oversimplifies the functions of the brain and says it is made up of three evolutionary layers: the ancient, reptile brain that works with instinct; the mammalian brain which works with emotions; and the human brain or neocortex, which is supposedly responsible for rational thought and said to be superior to others. However, this idea is outdated and is just wrong: all mammals and share the same biological outprint for the brain. The genes in the cortex are not "newer" than the ones in the other regions and humans are not the only animals with a large cortex. We cannot single out the cortex or deeper parts of the brain when it comes to cognition, learning, social thinking etc. This ties in nicely to the next chapter, which is:
3. Your Brain is a Network
The brain does not consist of clearly defined regions that have specialized functions coming together like lego blocks. Metaphors like left brain being more rational and analytical while the right brain being more imaginative or creative, or Daniel Kahneman's System 1 vs System 2 thinking are just metaphors for different modes of brain functioning and do not really correspond to different regions in the brain. The brain has many networks that sometimes overlap, and is in itself a network of networks.
4. Little Brains Wire Themselves to Their World
Humans are born early and the brain's wiring keeps changing in the early years. It is overly connected than usual and some connections are lost while others are strengthened throughout the years. The number one factor in determining which connections are lost and which are strengthened is the baby's social reality: the bonding with her mother, its immediate environment, the sensory stimuli it receives etc. This chapter also explains that poverty and isolation has serious long-term effects on the brain and the person's health in general.
5. Your Brain Predicts (Almost) Everything You Do
This chapter focuses on the predicting brain idea. The idea that the brain creates a model of the world based on past experience and predicts pretty much everything before it happens, rather than merely reacting to it. This is similar to the ideas presented in Anil Seth's "reality as a controlled hallucination" TED talk, or David Eagleman's Incognito, as well as the author's previous book, How Emotions are Made.
6. Your Brain Secretly Works with Other Brains
We learn from each other since infancy. And this learning is not just learning facts, we construct our entire reality based on the social input we receive. We also regulate each other's "body budgets" by our words and actions.
7. Brains Make More than One Kind of Mind
There are almost no universal, innate features when it comes to the mind. Cultural norms, traditions, our social reality define everything from food habits to how we perceive emotions and thoughts. Variation is the norm. This increases our chances as a species to survive and thrive in different environments.
8. Our Brains can Create Reality
Our reality is mostly a social reality: We create meaning together with other people, we wire each other's brains and regulate each other's well-being via social communication, teaching and learning. We give different meanings to objects and events, make up concepts such as money and countries which don't exist in the "physical world".
This chapter sums up the ideas presented about social reality, plasticity, predicting brain and talks about the ethical conclusions we can draw from these ideas. Our minds are products of our own culture and experiences, but we are not mere machines reacting to everything. We have the choice to change our predictions and behave differently in the future. (less)
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May 16, 2021Elentarri rated it it was ok
Shelves: science-general
I was expecting to learn something new, but didn't. This book is superficial, overly simplistic, tedious, and is peppered with the author's political opinions. My brain kept trying to skim over huge swaths of this book. (less)
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