We Are Our Brains: A Neurobiography of the Brain, from the Womb to Alzheimer's
D. F. Swaab
Language: English
Pages: 448
ISBN: 0812992962
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A vivid account of what makes us human.
Based groundbreaking new research, We Are Our Brains is a sweeping biography of the human brain, from infancy to adulthood to old age. Renowned neuroscientist D. F. Swaab takes us on a guided tour of the intricate inner workings that determine our potential, our limitations, and our desires, with each chapter serving as an eye-opening window on a different stage of brain development: the gender differences that develop in the embryonic brain, what goes on in the heads of adolescents, how parenthood permanently changes the brain.
Moving beyond pure biological understanding, Swaab presents a controversial and multilayered ethical argument surrounding the brain. Far from possessing true free will, Swaab argues, we have very little control over our everyday decisions, or who we will become, because our brains predetermine everything about us, long before we are born, from our moral character to our religious leanings to whom we fall in love with. And he challenges many of our prevailing assumptions about what makes us human, decoding the intricate “moral networks” that allow us to experience emotion, revealing maternal instinct to be the result of hormonal changes in the pregnant brain, and exploring the way that religious “imprinting” shapes the brain during childhood. Rife with memorable case studies, We Are Our Brains is already a bestselling international phenomenon. It aims to demystify the chemical and genetic workings of our most mysterious organ, in the process helping us to see who we are through an entirely new lens.
Did you know?
• The father’s brain is affected in pregnancy as well as the mother’s.
• The withdrawal symptoms we experience at the end of a love affair mirror chemical addiction.
• Growing up bilingual reduces the likelihood of Alzheimer’s.
• Parental religion is imprinted on our brains during early development, much as our native language is.
Praise for We Are Our Brains
“Swaab’s ‘neurobiography’ is witty, opinionated, passionate, and, above all, cerebral.”—Booklist (starred review)
“A fascinating survey . . . Swaab employs both personal and scientific observation in near-equal measure.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A cogent, provocative account of how twenty-first-century ‘neuroculture’ has the potential to effect profound medical and social change.”—Kirkus Reviews
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Obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong. Christopher Hitchens As far as I’m concerned, the most interesting question about religion isn’t whether God exists but why so many people are religious. There are around ten thousand different religions, each of which is convinced that there’s only one Truth and that they alone possess it. Hating people with a different faith seems to be part of belief. Around the year 1500,.
Properties. It’s only very rarely that we can do anything about the genetic burden handed down to a child. In the case of Down syndrome and other chromosomal abnormalities, there’s the option of prenatal diagnosis and, if a pathological gene has been found, abortion. Occasionally in vitro fertilization is a possibility, allowing the selection of an embryo that doesn’t have the defect in question, which can then be replaced in the uterus. This can, for instance, be done in the case of early-onset.
Levels. The same applies to operations like circumcision. That doesn’t prove, however, that pain is perceived consciously, because these autonomic responses come from regions below the cerebral cortex and therefore might be based on unconscious processes. The same applies to the movements that premature babies make in response to pain stimuli, because these can still be spinal-cord reflexes that don’t penetrate through to the cerebral cortex. Not only do anencephalic babies respond to physical.
During pregnancy that inhibits the breakdown of sex hormones. The differentiation of our sex organs takes place in the first months of pregnancy, while the sexual differentiation of the brain occurs in the second half of pregnancy. Since these two processes take place at different times, the theory is that in the case of transsexuality, they have been influenced independently of one another. If this is the case, one would expect to find female structures in the brains of MtF transsexuals and vice.
Doctor would stick his finger in the urine and taste it. If it tasted sweet, the patient was suffering from diabetes mellitus (meaning “sweet urine flow”). If it didn’t, the diagnosis was diabetes insipidus (tasteless urine flow), and that meant something was wrong with the kidneys or the brain. Every day, large quantities of blood pass through the kidneys in order to be cleaned. During this process, the kidneys recycle around fifteen liters of liquid from the waste fluid. They do this with the.