David Eagleman’s wide-ranging roundup of the current state of knowledge about the brain is concise, accessible and often very surprising. It’s a strange new world inside your head.” – Brian Eno So strap in for a whistle-stop tour into the inner cosmos. In the infinitely dense tangle of billions of brain cells and their trillions of connections, I hope you’ll be able to squint and make out something that you might not have expected to see in there. You. An interesting look at willpower. “…willpower isn’t something that we just exercise – it’s something we deplete.” Our perception of reality, ourselves and people around us are nothing but electrochemical cell signals getting generated in our brain. Neurons getting fired up whenever we feel or experience anything. The world that we perceive as reality is nothing but a picture getting created inside brain based on sensory inputs.

Harris showed volunteers photographs of people from different social groups, for example, homeless people, or drug addicts. And he found that the mPFC was less active when they looked at a homeless person. It’s as though the person was more like an object. Eagleman’s writing style is easy on the “brain”. His goal is to educate the general public and he succeeds. In the fine tradition of Carl Sagan, Eagleman shows that science is captivating without hyped embellishment, and, if you pay attention, you’ll find yourself immersed in it.” – Forbes Despite all this very impressive progress which Eagleman dutifully records, it has to be pointed out that neuroscience has so far achieved only a very limited understanding of how the brain actually works. Neural correlation especially has enabled a very thorough identification of areas responsible for a wide range of human behaviour, psychological as well as bodily. But whereas we now know much of what the brain does and where within itself it does what it does, neuroscience has yet to account for how it does what it does, an explanation for consciousness, the ‘hard problem’ par excellence, remaining particularly elusive. Why? Because the holy grail of neurological research – getting to grips with the brain’s internal software, no less – has yet to be realized. In these circumstances, it’s perhaps little exaggeration to say that its practitioners can be likened in some ways to a band of stone age people who, suddenly finding an abandoned car in the desert with the key still in the ignition, start playing with the dashboard controls, pressing switches, turning knobs and pulling levers, carefully noting as they do so that various lights come on and certain engine noises can be heard, some of which dim or stop when, after popping the hood, they yank out the odd cable, unscrew a few caps or drain a fluid reservoir. Do they have a clue about internal combustion, let alone electricity? No way.

I think of consciousness as the CEO of a large sprawling corporation, with many thousands of subdivisions and departments all collaborating and interacting and competing in different ways. Small companies don’t need a CEO – but when an organization reaches sufficient size and complexity, it needs a CEO to stay above the daily details and to craft the long-view of the company. Neuroscientist David Eagleman argues that the brain is like a field of battle: subject to conflicting drives and impulses that we are only just beginning to understand. He talks to Sally Davies, FT Weekend’s digital editor, about the nature of consciousness, why human beings are hardwired for xenophobia, and how technology can extend our cognitive powers. Equipped with an understanding of how human brains actually make decisions, we can develop new approaches beyond punishment. As we come to better appreciate the operations inside our brains, we can better align our behavior with our best intentions... Although societies possess deeply ingrained impulses for punishment, a different kind of criminal justice system – one with a closer relationship to the neuroscience of decisions – can be imagined. Such a legal system wouldn’t let anyone off the hook, but it would be more concerned with how to deal with law breakers with an eye toward their future rather than writing them off because of their past. Who's in Control? - Well, most of the time the conscious brain isn't. Most of the time, we are on autopilot: allowing the conscious part of the brain free to take the really big decisions. Just think about the things you do automatically without thinking about them at all - like taking a bath in the morning or driving to work. The complex levels of sensory and motor co-ordination required for these tasks are handled at underneath the hood (so to speak). This area is so highly speculative that there is almost no research that sheds light on it, but I can understand how the producers of the program thought this would be a good hook for people who wonder about the Singularity.

An intellectual thrill-ride. Plus, Eagleman isn’t merely a brilliant guide, he can turn a phrase, too.” – Newsday Our brains make social judgments constantly. But do we learn this skill or are we born with it? To find out, one can investigate whether babies have it. Reproducing an experiment from psychologists Kiley Hamlin, Karen Wynn and Paul Bloom at Yale University, I invited babies, one at a time, to a puppet show. These babies were less than a year old, just beginning to explore the world around them. They were positioned on their mothers’ laps to watch the show. From the renowned neuroscientist and New York Times bestselling author of Incognito comes the companion volume to the international PBS series about how your life shapes your brain, and how your brain shapes your life. All the experiences in your life – from single conversations to your broader culture – shape the microscopic details of your brain..."As Harris puts it, by shutting down the systems that see the homeless person as a fellow human, one doesn’t have to experience the unpleasant pressures of feeling bad about not giving money. In other words, the homeless have become dehumanised: the brain is viewing them more like objects and less like people. As Harris explains: “If you don’t properly diagnose people as human beings, then the moral rules that are reserved for human people may not apply.”