The Charlie Rose Brain Series is a GRATE Way to Learn

www.psychologytoday.com/blog/you-illuminated/201009/recap-the-charlie-rose-brain-series-episode-1

Topic Overview

Making sense of our experiences with the world around us is a problem philosophers have wrestled with for centuries. Modern neuroscientists think that, with the recent advances in science, they are poised to solve it.

The brain is the great frontier in the pursuit of understanding everyone's favorite subject, ourselves. The brain is at the center of our individuality. Throughout history, we've attempted to shine light on the human experience through literature, art and philosophy as well as biology. Neuroscience is a natural bridge between the humanities and biological science. Scientific advances have helped us understand how the brain processes consciousness, free will, perception, cognition, emotion and memory.

Featured Researchers

To delve into the intricacies of the brain, Rose turned to the experts—leading neuroscientists and philosophers. Nobel-laureate and pioneering memory neuroscientist Eric Kandel joined Rose as the co-host of this round table discussion. Participants included John Searle, preeminent philosopher of free will in the brain; Gerald Fischbach, neurologist and autism expert; Cornelia Bargmann, who studies the brains of microscopic worms; and Anthony Movshon, a psychologist and neuroscientist who studies the visual system of monkeys. Together, they discussed our current understanding of the brain, its structure, and the keys to cracking the mysteries that still confront us.

Key Insights

The human mind is created from the activity of our brain cells; without these cells we couldn't see, think or decide what to have for dinner.

We are one part nature, one part nurture.
There is a genetically-determined, universal logic behind the brain's macro-architecture. All human brains are put together similarly, with two hemispheres and the same regional specificity for seeing, hearing and feeling. On a smaller level, every brain is unique based upon the person's experiences and the things they've learned. Each human brain has a hippocampus that looks roughly the same and serves the same function, but the memories contained within the hippocampus are as unique as our fingerprints.

The brain is constantly changing.
The brain is not hard-wired, as was once believed. Everything we do in the course of our lives, from reading a book to chatting with our friends, causes our brains to change. As we learn, the brain must adapt to store that knowledge. The brain creates memories by strengthening or establishing new connections between cells. Conversely, by breaking the connections between cells, memories can be forgotten. This can happen on a short-term basis, like we when hear a telephone number, but then can't recall it ten minutes later. In this case, the brain undergoes a functional change, but it doesn't undergo an anatomical change. When we learn something on a long-term basis, part of the brain's anatomy is forever different. Cells restructure to account for the memory, and actively maintain the new structure for as long as the memory persists.

The complexity of the brain lies in the cell, the most basic unit of life. 
It is not the size of our brain or the number of cells we possess that provides us with extraordinary processing power. Human intelligence arises from the genetic code that tells our brain cells how to function. This code is responsible for creating the connections between cells, the unique structure of our brains and our ability to adapt to our environment.

Our brain is amazingly fragile. 
The brain, a three pound organ, consumes 20% of all the body's energy. A lapse in blood flow for a few seconds will cause the death of thousands of cells, as they're deprived of the vital energy from blood.

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