exercising the brain causes it to weaken or lose altogether many of its existing neuronal connections. Even Charles Darwin, who knew nothing of neurons, realised the truth of ‘use it or lose it’. ‘If I had to livemy life over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘For perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use.’
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s big secret. Like natural selection in evolution and DNA in genetics, it is an idea so central to understanding the brain that, without it, nothing makes any sense. Neuroplasticity explains how new experiences constantly rewire the brain – the ultimate lump of programmable matter. It explains how the blank slate of a baby’s brain becomes an adult brain. It explains how a stroke victim may recover lost faculties when the task of the afflicted neurons is taken over by neurons in an adjacent area of the brain. Rehabilitation is long and hard because the process of reprogramming is analogous to a child learning skills for the first time.
And neoplasticity persists as long as you live. Your brain will still be able to make new connections even when you are a hundred years old. A centenarian can learn to use a computer – they might not learn as fast as a child but they can do it.
Can the brain understand the brain?
‘The brain boggles the mind,’ says James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA. 23 It remains the last and grandest frontier in biology, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our Universe. But we have taken the first tentative steps along the road to understanding it. Nevertheless, there is still a long way to go. But is the destination even reachable? ‘If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t,’ wrote the American biologist Emerson M. Pugh. 24
Logically, Pugh is correct. The human brain can never completely understand the human brain. It would be like suspending yourself in mid-air by yanking upwards on your shoe laces. However, the brain is not trying to understand the brain.
Many brains
are trying to understand the brain: the combined minds of international scientific community. ‘All the brains are not in one head’, as an Italian proverb puts it.
We are still no closer to answering the question posed at the beginning of this chapter: why is the Universe constructed in such a way that it acquires the ability to become curious about itself? But, if we understand the brain, we shall finally be able to address it. ‘As long as our brain is a mystery,’ said Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of neuroscience, ‘the Universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain, will also be a mystery.’
Notes
1 In Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone’.
2 In Kenneth Grahame,
The Wind in the Willows.
3 Ambrose Bierce,
The Devil’s Dictionary.
4 Oscar Wilde,
De Profundis.
5 Remarkably, if a sponge is minced up and its cells put in water, the cells will reconstitute themselves as a sponge once more.
6 If a charged atom or molecule is common in one location, such an ion will tend to move, or diffuse, to an area of lower concentration.
7 ‘The Origin of the Brain’, http://tinyurl.com/d7sbhpk.
8 To be precise, the chemical messengers are contained in structures at the end of an axon known as terminal buttons. It is these that release them into the synaptic gap.
9 Interview with PBS, USA.
10 See Chapter 9, ‘Programmable matter: Computers’.
11 Peter Norvig, ‘Brainy Machines’.
12 Daniel Dennett,
Consciousness Explained.
13 David Dalrymple, on leave from Harvard University, is aiming to build a complete simulation of the
C. elegans
nervous system. This will require first determining the function, behaviour and biophysics of each of the 302 neurons (Randal A. Koene, ‘How to Copy a Brain’,
New Scientist
, 27
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s big secret. Like natural selection in evolution and DNA in genetics, it is an idea so central to understanding the brain that, without it, nothing makes any sense. Neuroplasticity explains how new experiences constantly rewire the brain – the ultimate lump of programmable matter. It explains how the blank slate of a baby’s brain becomes an adult brain. It explains how a stroke victim may recover lost faculties when the task of the afflicted neurons is taken over by neurons in an adjacent area of the brain. Rehabilitation is long and hard because the process of reprogramming is analogous to a child learning skills for the first time.
And neoplasticity persists as long as you live. Your brain will still be able to make new connections even when you are a hundred years old. A centenarian can learn to use a computer – they might not learn as fast as a child but they can do it.
Can the brain understand the brain?
‘The brain boggles the mind,’ says James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA. 23 It remains the last and grandest frontier in biology, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our Universe. But we have taken the first tentative steps along the road to understanding it. Nevertheless, there is still a long way to go. But is the destination even reachable? ‘If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t,’ wrote the American biologist Emerson M. Pugh. 24
Logically, Pugh is correct. The human brain can never completely understand the human brain. It would be like suspending yourself in mid-air by yanking upwards on your shoe laces. However, the brain is not trying to understand the brain.
Many brains
are trying to understand the brain: the combined minds of international scientific community. ‘All the brains are not in one head’, as an Italian proverb puts it.
We are still no closer to answering the question posed at the beginning of this chapter: why is the Universe constructed in such a way that it acquires the ability to become curious about itself? But, if we understand the brain, we shall finally be able to address it. ‘As long as our brain is a mystery,’ said Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of neuroscience, ‘the Universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain, will also be a mystery.’
Notes
1 In Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone’.
2 In Kenneth Grahame,
The Wind in the Willows.
3 Ambrose Bierce,
The Devil’s Dictionary.
4 Oscar Wilde,
De Profundis.
5 Remarkably, if a sponge is minced up and its cells put in water, the cells will reconstitute themselves as a sponge once more.
6 If a charged atom or molecule is common in one location, such an ion will tend to move, or diffuse, to an area of lower concentration.
7 ‘The Origin of the Brain’, http://tinyurl.com/d7sbhpk.
8 To be precise, the chemical messengers are contained in structures at the end of an axon known as terminal buttons. It is these that release them into the synaptic gap.
9 Interview with PBS, USA.
10 See Chapter 9, ‘Programmable matter: Computers’.
11 Peter Norvig, ‘Brainy Machines’.
12 Daniel Dennett,
Consciousness Explained.
13 David Dalrymple, on leave from Harvard University, is aiming to build a complete simulation of the
C. elegans
nervous system. This will require first determining the function, behaviour and biophysics of each of the 302 neurons (Randal A. Koene, ‘How to Copy a Brain’,
New Scientist
, 27
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