The importance of social connection and its relevance to brain function is another insightful chapter, that talks about how we are preprogrammed to read subtle facial, auditory, and other sensory cues and how empathy works in the context of the pain matrix of the brain. This has been demonstrated with patients who have had the two hemispheres of their brains severed from one another.

The Brain: The Story of You - David Eagleman - Google Books

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The lack of preparedness during birth (as compared to animals) gives us the flexibility to adapt and thrive in different environments. When making life-and-death decisions, unchecked reason can be dangerous; our emotions are a powerful and often insightful constituency, and we’d be remiss to exclude them from the parliamentary voting.

BBC Four - The Brain with David Eagleman BBC Four - The Brain with David Eagleman

The uploaded copy has all your memories and believes it was you, just there, standing outside the computer, in your body. Genocide is only possible when dehumanization happens on a massive scale, and the perfect tool for this job is propaganda: it keys right into the neural networks that understand other people, and dials down the degree to which we empathize with them. This inclination to assign intention to non-human characters was highlighted in a short film made in 1944 by Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider and his American colleague Marianne Simmel.Uploading may not be all that different from what happens to you each night when you go to sleep: you experience a little death of your consciousness, and the person who wakes up on your pillow the next morning inherits all your memories, and believes him or herself to be you. Although humans are competitive and individualistic much of the time, we spend quite a bit of our lives co-operating for the good of the group. For those who read books about the brain, Eagleman's book might be a bit too 'basic', only scratching the surface of neuroscience. It’s easy to think about the brain commanding the body from on high – but in fact the brain is in constant feedback with the body. Your eyes are not like video cameras – they simply venture out to find more details to feed into the internal model.