Book Review : Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain
During the busy interview week, I find it very difficult to produce a quality article about the programming skills and knowledge I learn every day. Therefore, I've decided to record and share some of the good books that I've read last year and this year.
The book I want to share today is called "Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain," which I finished reading in November 2023. Some of the key points I think are really interesting to me.
Childhood poverty is the greatest obstacle to human potential
Lack of normal interaction with the outside world in the early years of life can be a serious obstacle to brain development. It's a lot worse than we thought.
Orphans or underprivileged children whose social needs are severely neglected such as
- raised in dysfunctional family
- raised in a closed environment in an orphanage
Eye contact, touching, oral communication is very important for brain development. Lack of normal brain development from above conditions leads to mental retardation and brain atrophy.
The wave of orphans during the war resulted in a large number of problem children.
The brain's most important job
Take control of your body and live a good life.
- Our brain learn from the past.
- Our Experience not only includes the memory, but also the log of the body. (like the logback in Java, or other programming logging info)
- We integrate this information to form our own perceptions and experiences of the outside world.
- We combine these things to predict the outside world.
We integrate this information to form our own perceptions and experiences of the outside world, and we combine these things to predict the outside world.
The brain only constructs what it experiences
The brain guesses, then makes meaning, even before we actually experience it.
For example, when we drink water, it takes 20 seconds for the water to enter the bloodstream, but the brain creates a thirst-quenching sensation for us to perceive right away.
The brain acts before it senses.
Practice : Be open minded
Deliberately choose topics that are different from your own, and then focus on understanding them. The goal is to be careful not to let our subconscious take over our thinking.
We take responsibility for ourselves because we're the only ones who can change our situation.We have the opportunity to change our predictions before they happen.
Every person has certain choices, and that's a free space.
That allows us to think about the possibilities.
Brainstorming secret multiplayer connections
Synchronize with others
When we're with someone we're with, breathing and heartbeats are gradually synchronized, and the brain reshapes its influence on each other.
This is how our brains work: We share our body budgets with each other.
Words
It has a real physical effect on other people's physiology.
- People with support groups live longer, people with happy domestic partners.
- People who work with a company and people they trust perform better.
- Eat together, live longer.
Negative Examples
- Being exposed to multiple stressors makes us more sensitive to stress because our brains can't easily determine the source of the stress.
- Eating under stress will result in more calories being eaten
- Too much hate speech can damage the brain.
Positive Examples
- Building positive feedback over time will bring long term benefits to others
The weakness of empathy
We don't empathize with people we don't know well.
Because the more familiar we are with someone or something, the more effective we are at predicting and empathizing.
- When we react to something we don't know well, it takes an enormous amount of resources for our brain to do so.
- Our brains are naturally very uncomfortable with this.
After the reading, I've realized that our body and mind respond in complex ways. Our interactions with others, and the environments we inhabit such as education, co-workers, family, friends, play significant roles, as they influence the reactions of our brains.
Some Takeaways of mine
- It is important to improve the poverty of children (I think let's why I start the Java side project with scholarship system, and in the future I really want to do more things that beneficial to the society).
- Positively influencing on others is important.
- Try to understand the points that are very different from your own, and practice not making judgments in the first place.