The brain: a user's guide [View all]

[rug]

By Nigel Farndale
11:30AM BST 24 Apr 2012

It ought to be quite intimidating, talking to David Eagleman. He is one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, after all, known for his work on time perception, synaesthesia and the use of neurology in criminal justice. But as anyone who has read his best-selling books or listened to his TED talks online will know, he has a gift for communicating complicated ideas in an accessible and friendly way — Brian Cox with an American accent.

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Indeed, according to Eagleman, we mostly run on unconscious autopilot. Our neural systems have been carved by natural selection to solve problems that were faced by our ancestors. Which brings me to another of his books, Why The Net Matters. As the father of children who spend a great deal of their time on the internet, I want to know if he thinks it is changing their brains.

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Eagleman calls himself neither religious nor atheist, I should point out, but a Possibilian, a denomination of his own invention, that, like the book, has attracted a cult following. “The idea with Possibilians is that we don’t know what is going on here. It is a big, strange, lovely cosmos and if there’s one thing that is clear it’s that our ignorance of it is too vast to commit to atheism, and at the same time we know too much to commit to a particular religion.”

If we get closer to understanding the human brain, will it help us understand the universe, I ask, not feeling entirely confident that my question makes any sense. “Boy, that seems right,” he says. (Phew). “What’s happening in brain science at the moment is as exciting as the discoveries that are being made about the cosmos. Inner space and outer space. Maybe consciousness is a new kind of force, in the way electricity or magnetism is. It might be that, as we explore the brain, we come to an understanding of consciousness as being a separate property.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/9214684/The-brain-a-users-guide.html