Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain

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.

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.

I have listened to this book twice, as well as listening to Feldman-Barrett's more in depth, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, book three times.I have listened so often because I am determined to remember all this brilliant researcher has to say about the brain. Her debunking of silly views of the brain, and worse, sillier research on the brain, is so rich, sensible and clear that I am in AWE!Feldman-Barrett's view of the brain is not just clear, but it allows for each of us to comprehend just how much we can control our behaviour, if we better understand the body/brain connection. Her views on networks, multi-useful neurons, and the body budget are so liberating that I have sent her books to teens I know. I am trying to get these teens to understand that they are NOT part lizard, that they can understand how sleep, nutrition and stress control all lead to better lives.If you want an overview of Feldman-Barrett's understanding of the brain, get this book, but if you really want to learn the quality of her thinking about the brain, get How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.I am not promoting these books because I am associated with them, or their author. I am simply an older man who grew up with all the myths about the brain that Feldman-Barrett clears away. And her comprehension of how the brain/body interact, is useful for all of us, at all ages, to live better lives. We can't control much in this crazy world, but we can control how we think and feel and ultimately act if we understand what Feldman-Barrett is revealing in her brilliant work.George YoungMontreal Canada

Livro curto, com ideias esclarecedores sobre parte da condição humana. Por exemplo, com elegência e clareza, mostra o básico de como nosso cérebro permite nós humanos sermos os criadors de nosso mundo social. Há bem mais de sete razões em meia para ler com prazer.

As of now on chapter 3 ... will add on more once finish. A must read ...

This book is great. It's easy to read and includes so many mind-opening scientific insights very well explained in simple words.

It's a small book but with a great content!