The Brain

It’s more than 7 years after reading this book twice, that I am writing my opinions on it. I feel it will be just if I continue to write after reading it once again, but here we go anyway.

This was probably the first non-fiction book that I truely found riverting. It was introduced to me by my friend during my undergrad days, Yudhajit Ain. This book goes into wonderful dephts of neuroscience and the theory of mind and self. It was the first time perhaps when I serious started asking “who am I?”. And this book answered that I am always a moving target - my identity is always changing shape, depending on the interactions that I have or the things I do, and that is, in neuroscience jargon, called neuroplasticity. It’s when the connections between neurons change depending on experience. These changes in connections are more dynamic when we are younger and slow down into more solid but stable connections as we grow older (but does entirely stop unlike popular belief). These connections eventually result in different “skills”, “memories”, “intuitions”, “beliefs” or any similar abstract word that you can think of. Also, came across a popular phrase - neurons that fire together, wire together.

TLDR, I really enjoyed reading this book and it changed my perspective on a lot of things. Hopefully for the better.