The Brain and Cognition
For this online assignment I decided to watch two of the videos from PBS program called
“The Brain” by David Eagleman. These two videos were “What makes me?” and “What is
reality?”. I must admit that I was fascinated by how our brain operates and the capabilities of it.
It was an insightful video and I discovered and learnt a lot of new things about our brain that was
not registered to me before. It is fascinating to see how much our brain is capable of operating
extraordinary functions through quadrillions of connections and trillions of electrochemical
signals.
What makes me?
In this video, David Eagleman tries to solve the mystery of what shapes us in who we
become. He wondered whether it is our experiences or our brain that shapes us into a person that
we are today. The video shares the difference between human and animal adaptability. Animal
has life skill built in to their system right from birth as we can see a whale swimming right after
they were born. They have innate life skill but somehow lack adaptability as whale cannot
survive in a desert or on land without water surrounding them. In contrast, human can adapt and
survive in different ecosystem but lack innate life skills and learn them through their experiences
with the world around them. In the video, the narrator explained how humans are helpless when
they were first born and dependent on another individual to help them connect to the world. It is
also interesting to see how lack of experience in human can result in brain being wired
incorrectly. This claim was made after investigating and observing the children in an orphanage
who were kept in isolation and were neglected by people around them. It was apparent that their
brain development was compromised with reduced neural activity that shaped them into
individuals with a mental issue as they grew up. In early age, the children suffered from speech
delay due to lack of interactions with people and develop attachment issue. The event and
research enlightened me of how much our experiences in life is important for our brain
development.
Another experiment was made on teenagers to observe how much social situation can
affect their stress level by making them sit behind the glass wall while a group of people came to
stare at them. Their stress level was measured through their sweat glands and the result came out
as a high stress level compared to adults in this same exact social situation. Their emotions were
dramatically impacted by this event. The video also mentioned about how teenagers were more
likely to take greater risk due to their poor impulse control as their brain is still developing
cognitively.
One thing that stood out to me the most in this video is how our experience alter
the physical structure and the shape of posterior hippocampus by examining the shape of
it from several people before and after training for the extremely tough vehicle exam. The
about of information stored in the spatial memory of our human brain stimulate posterior
hippocampus to reshape its structure to accommodate the task in hand. The result came
out as the shape of the posterior hippocampus larger than before training and this concept
was known as plasticity. Throughout the video I have encounter multitude of fascinating
facts about our brain and cognition. It is apparent to me that our experiences and the brain
interacts collaboratively to construct our memory, personality and an individualism to
envision the world as who we are. The narrative “We are works in progress” in this video
also stood out to me as we are all individuals learning new things actively each day and
making sense of the world around us through our experiences.
What makes reality?
Reality is all about what is inside our head and we see the world through the
interpretation of our brain. Our brain creates a individualized lens of each of us to
determine our own reality. Reality differs from each one of us depending on how our
brain construct them. Our senses are the vital for this process as they convert information
that we received from our surrounding to electromagnetic signals which initiate
connections with each other to form a reality of what we see, hears, tastes or feels. In this
vides, the process of cross-referencing captivates my attention as the narrator explained
how our senses interconnect with one another (“Taste is affected by our sense of smell.”,
“…what we touch influence how we see”, and “Sight inform how we hear”). These
streams of data are compared and interact collaboratively to build a reality.
In this video an interesting experiment was carried out on the prisoners who were
kept in isolation and in a cell with no light. It is surprising that they started daydreaming
and sometimes beyond imagining as they claimed to see things as if they were happening
in reality. This shows that our brain is capable of generating their own imagery and a
sense of reality even if there is a deprivation of sensory information. The video also
conveys the message of how the world live inside our brain as it simulates reality of its
own.
“Reality is constructed as we filter it through our beliefs, values and issues.”