The Brain Book

Know Your Own Mind and How to Use it

Peter Russell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135853914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The best popular introduction to the human brain and how to make the most of it!

Part One

DEVELOPMENT AND STRUCTURE

1.

The Spearhead of Evolution

What are the brain's limits?

Is the brain like a computer?

Why don't we use our brains fully?

What makes a genius?

Does early environment affect a child?

There are brains that can detect the minutest changes in light, sound, smell, and touch; delicately and accurately integrate the actions of many muscles; regulate the functioning of the body's many organs so as to preserve the optimum conditions for life. Such brains learn from experience, and they have found ways to communicate with each other through simple “languages” and so share their knowledge. They are also sensitive to magnetic and electric fields and ultraviolet light. They can analyze the polarization of sunlight and use it to tell directions. They keep a constant track of time, even through the night. These brains function as accurate guidance systems; compensating for wind direction, they correlate the rapid beating of four tiny wings, landing their little bodies delicately at the center of a waving flower. Such brains are the size of a grain of salt, contain a mere nine

Figure 1 The bee and the human brain.

hundred neurons, and can be found inside a bee's head. What then can we expect from our own brains, ten million times the size, and many billion times as complex?

Clearly the human brain has to control a much larger body. This, however, is only part of the answer; a much smaller brain could carry out all the necessary functions quite satisfactorily. A shark, for example, has a large body and very accurate senses, but its brain is very much smaller than ours.

Where we differ most radically from bees and sharks—and from virtually every other creature—is in our highly developed use of language, our capacity to learn not only from our own experience but from that of others, and our ability to adapt the environment to our own needs.

A human being has the faculty of self-consciousness, in the sense of being aware of his own experiences and of himself as a conscious being.* With this awareness of his own conscious processes comes freedom of choice and the ability to make deliberate actions. He is also an intelligent being. Intelligence, in its broadest sense, may be defined as the ability to modify instinctive behavior in the light of previous experience; to abstract common elements from situations that may appear to have nothing in common and to apply these insights to future activities. Intelligence and self-consciousness together give human beings the unique capacity to progress and evolve within their own lifetimes.

The smallest development in physical evolution takes thousands of generations. Mental evolution is many times faster. An individual's nervous system is continually changing and adapting to the environment throughout his life. Our knowledge of ourselves and the world around us is growing at a fantastic rate. The number of new books and scientific papers, for example, is doubling every eight years.¹ The more we apply this knowledge to our own betterment, the faster we will progress and evolve, both as individuals and as a race.

The culmination of millions of years of evolution has been the development of the human brain. Not only is the human brain aware of its own existence, but through it the universe has begun to know itself. Our minds have become the spearhead of evolution, and the degree to which we progress depends upon the degree to which we make use of this most incredible product of nature—the degree to which we use our intelligence and our consciousness to the full.

UNLIMITED POTENTIAL

The intricate web of nerves that constitutes the human nervous system weighs only three and a half pounds yet is probably the most complex system known in the universe. And, by the awe and wonderment it produces, it is for some the most beautiful.

The more that is learned about the human brain, the more its capacities and potentials are found to go far beyond earlier speculations. The storage capacity of the brain, for example, is sufficient to record a thousand new bits of information every second from birth to old age, and still have room to spare. Recent experiments suggest we may in fact remember everything that happens to us.

As a processor of information the brain is extraordinarily fast. It can, for instance, receive the visual image of a person's face in a few hundredths of a second; analyze its many details in a quarter of a second; and synthesize all the information into a single whole, creata conscious three-dimensional full-color experience of the face, recognize this face out of thousands of others recorded in memory—even though the face may never before have been seen in this position, this light, these surroundings, or with this expression on it—and recall from memory details about the person and numerous ideas, associations, and images connected with the person, all in less than a second. At the same time it will be interpreting the expression on the face, generating emotional feelings toward the person, deciding on courses of action, possibly starting intricate combinations of muscle processes throughout the body, resulting in an outstretched hand, a smile, and complex vibrations of the vocal cords (full of subtle intonations), saying “Hi, Sam.” While all the foregoing transpires, the brain will be analyzing and digesting other visual data and data from the other senses, using some of them, such as sounds and smells, to help identify the face. It will also be monitoring and adjusting the body's position, keeping it in balance or moving smoothly; and it will continually be checking on several hundred internal physiological parameters, such as the temperature and chemical constituents of the blood, and compensating for any deviations from normal so as to maintain the body in its optimum state of functioning. The brain continues in this way, perceiving, remembering, monitoring, and integrating a myriad different functions every second of every day of our lives.

Human perception is extremely acute. The nose, for example, can detect one molecule of gas, while a cell in the retina of the eye is sensitive to a single photon of light, and if the ear were any more sensitive, it would pick up the sound of the random vibrations of its own molecules. The brain is sensitive to magnetic and electric fields, to the phases of the moon, and possibly to the positions of the planets as well.²There is now increasing evidence that we are also sensitive to the mental activities of other people, being directly affected by their moods and thoughts.³

In order to cope with the problems of day-to-day survival the normal brain appears to limit its awareness, filtering out a large part of its sensory input. However, the brain's full sensitivity is sometimes revealed in pathological cases. Physicist Leonid Vasiliev reported on a man who could suddenly make out tiny objects from great distances. He died within twenty-four hours, and a blood clot was found on the right side of his optic prominence. Schizophrenics show abnormal sensory acuity. Addison's disease (a shortage of adrenal cortical hormones) enhances taste 150 times and sharpens smell and hearing.⁴

It is frequently stated that we use only 10 percent of our full mental potential. This, it now appears, is rather an overestimate. We probably do not use even 1 percent—more likely 0.1 percent or less. The apparent limits of the human brain are only the limits of the uses to which we put it, and the limits of what we believe is possible.

In terms of its complexity and versatility, the human brain far surpasses any computer on earth. Computers, it is true, are very fast at mathematical calculations and step-by-step logical processes, but these represent only a small part of the brain's many abilities.

The most important difference between the brain and a computer is that the brain not only works in a linear step-by-step fashion, but also performs parallel processing, integrating and synthesizing information, and abstracting from it generalities. Whereas the human brain can recognize a face in less than a second, there is no computer in the world that could do the same. Computers have been developed which can recognize a simple object such as a cup from a collection of ten or so other objects, but they will take several minutes to do this. Moreover, they cannot recognize individual objects—only general classes of objects.

A transistorized computer capable of all the human brain can do would not fit inside Carnegie Hall. Recent advances in electronic miniaturization allow the circuitry for a sophisticated pocket calculator to be put on a small chip only a few millimeters square. Yet even using such tiny circuits, a computer containing the same potential as your brain would weigh more than ten tons. Conversely, the whole of the world's telephone system is equivalent to only about one gram of your brain—a piece the size of a pea!

Despite the vast amount being discovered about the brain's fantastic capacity and the ways in which it works, few people know how to make the best use of their brains. A major reason for this is that as children few of us were taught about mental functions themselves. We were probably told to remember various facts but not taught about how memory works and how best to remember, told to study and digest books but not taught how to approach a book in order to get the most out of it, told to read but not taught how the eye and brain work during reading, told to observe but not taught about the processes of attention, told to make notes but not taught in what form information is most easily assimilated by the brain. It is little wonder then that people continually complain of poor memory, slow reading, and lack of concentration.

There are numerous handbooks on gardening, building, television repair, travel, car maintenance, solar generators, and windmills; and many handbooks on the body, health, diet, and sex. But there is almost nothing on how the brain works and how to get the most out of it. In this book recent research on the brain and its potential will be brought together to show how your brain can be used more efficiently and how to take the best care of it.

A BORN GENIUS?

Until recently, it was thought that a chimpanzee could not learn language. Studies in the United States, however, have now shown this to be false. The chimp's deficiency lies not in its brain but in its larynx. It has no proper voice box. So researchers have concentrated on using various forms of sign language rather than speech to investigate the chimp's linguistic abilities.

In the late 1960s Allen and Beatrice Gardner, at the University of Nevada, taught a female chimp the sign language used by deaf-mutes, and within three years she had a vocabulary of over eighty words and was making up combinations of words on her own.⁵ Following this, David Premack, at the University of Los Angeles at Santa Barbara, taught a chimp a language using simple plastic shapes of various colors. In this case, the chimp not only readily mastered a vocabulary of 120 words but began to make abstractions and form concepts from them.⁶Even more impressive work has been done at the Stanford Research Institute, where a gorilla has learned a vocabulary of over one thousand words.⁷ And a thousand words is the working vocabulary of the average American. If a “dumb” gorilla can do this, what can a human brain do given a real chance?

Numerous studies on geniuses and gifted children suggest that our mental abilities are not genetically inherited in the same way as are red hair, blue eyes, or ear lobes. Our mental aptitudes seem to be determined more by the quality of our early environment, especially the periods immediately before and after birth. A common feature of nearly all gifted children is that they were brought up in a rich and varied environment with plenty of opportunities to learn.

In 1800 a German doctor called Witte decided to give his child Karl as rich an environment as possible. Although slow initially, Karl Witte quickly caught up. By the age of six he was described as a “precocious lad”; at nine he entered the University of Leipzig; at fourteen he gained his Ph.D., and at sixteen his Doctor of Law.⁸

Dr. Witte's program became the model for many aspi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One / Development and Structure
• Part Two / Function and Potential
• Chapter Notes
• Suggested Further Reading
• Index