Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Preface ix
4. Primer: Our Human Brain Was Not Designed All at Once by a Genius Inventor on a Blank Sheet of Paper 1
5. Science Is an Ongoing Process, Not a Belief System 9
6. Developing, Changing
7. Genetics Provides a Window on Human Individuality 19
8. Though the Brain Has Billions of Neurons, Wiring It All Up May Depend upon Very Simple Rules 26
9. From Birth Onward, Our Experience of the World Is Dominated by the Brain’s Continual Conversation with Itself 34
10. Children’s Brains Are Different 40
11. Your Twelve-Year-Old Isn’t Just Sprouting New Hair but Is Also Forming (and Being Formed by) New Neural Connections 45
12. How You Use Your Brain Can Change Its Basic Structural Organization 52
13. Tool Use Can Instantly Rewire the Brain 60
14. Life Experiences and Addictive Drugs Change Your Brain in Similar Ways 66
15. Signaling
16. Like It or Not, the Brain Grades on a Curve 75
17. The Brain Achieves Its Computational Power through a Massively Parallel Architecture 82
18. The Brain Harbors Many Neurotransmitters 88
19. Anticipating, Sensing, Moving
20. The Eye Knows What Is Good for Us 97
21. You Have a Superpower—It’s Called Vision 105
22. The Sense of Taste Encompasses Two Roles: Conscious Taste Perception and Subconscious Metabolic Responses 110
23. It Takes an Ensemble of Strangely Shaped Nerve Endings to Build a Touch 119
24. The Bane of Pain Is Plainly in the Brain 128
25. Time’s Weird in the Brain—That’s a Good Thing, and Here’s Why 135
26. The Cerebellum Learns to Predict the Physics of Our Movements 161
27. Neuroscience Can Show Us a New Way to Rehabilitate Brain Injury: The Case of Stroke 167
28. Almost Everything You Do Is a Habit 177
29. Relating
30. Interpreting Information in Voice Requires Brain Circuits for Emotional Recognition and Expression 185
31. Mind Reading Emerged at Least Twice in the Course of Evolution 194
32. We Are Born to Help Others 201
33. Intense Romantic Love Uses Subconscious Survival Circuits in the Brain 208
34. Human Sexual Orientation Is Strongly Influenced by Biological Factors 215
35. Deciding
36. Deep Down, You Are a Scientist 227
37. Studying Monkey Brains Can Teach Us about Advertising 231
38. Beauty Matters in Ways We Know and in Ways We Don’t 238
39. “Man Can Do What He Wants, but He Cannot Will What He Wants” 245
40. The Brain Is Overrated 252
41. Dopamine Made You Do It 257
42. The Human Brain, the True Creator of Everything, Cannot Be Simulated by Any Turing Machine 263
43. There Is No Principle That Prevents Us from Eventually Building Machines That Think 270
44. Epilogue 277
45. Contributors 283
46. Acknowledgments 285
47. Index 287