Why this book. Selected by a reading/discussion book I’m in, as a good follow up to Descarte’s Error.  One member of our group pointed us to a Lisa Feldman Barrett Ted Talk which impressed us all, then an interview with her on youtube, and as a group, we decided then to read this book. Good idea.

Summary in 3 sentences;  Lisa Feldman Barrett begins with a brief explanation of the evolution of the brain from a mini-worm amphioxus 550 million years ago, through many evolutionary iterations, until one of evolution’s branches and sequels, led to the human brain.  She then spends the next 7 1/2 chapters debunking  myths about how the brain works, and instructing us in the fundamental biological processes that govern our cerebral functions. And she makes clear that understanding these functions and processes are key to understanding why we are like we are, why and how people interact with each other and their environments like they do, and she offers a few ideas for how we can use that understanding to take some steps that could  help  us improve our lives.  

My impressions. A really well done overview of the role that our brain’s biology plays in how we think, behave, and live.  It is a short, easy, enjoyable read.  Professor Barrett takes some of the cutting edge insights about the human brain and mind (they are not the same) and shares them with us in language and conceptual descriptions that are easily understandable and accessible to someone with a  high school education or better, but not necessarily a strong background in brain biology.   She distills the insights of neuroscience and biology about the brain into insights that are useful for the rest of us. 

There is a lot to understand here – she presents her case simply and clearly, but the implications are mind bending.  She makes clear that we ARE biological creatures and the biology of the brain that we are born with very much influences how we perceive ourselves, the world, our relationships with others, and how we live.  That is such an important insight – and  I’m not even altogether sure what to do with it.  This book is a great primer on the brain and catalyst for reflection – as I try to understand how these insights should change and enhance my understanding of my own potential, my relationships to the people in my life and my environment, my “spirituality,”  my moods,  how I live.  Rereading my review of Sam Harris’s book Waking Up tells me that Waking Up would be a good companion book to 7 1/2 Lessons.  

A few of the Key insights I got from the book:

• Body Budget.  A new concept for me, that makes sense. One of the brain’s key functions is to manage what she call the “body budget” and the brain spends or saves our mental and physical energy,  similarly to how we spend and save money.  Stress, busy-ness, physical exercise draw down our accounts, while rest, relaxation, nutrition and sleep replenish them.  The brain’s default mode is to be efficient and lazy – to save energy – but it develops strength and resilience by spending energy and then replenishing it.    

“your brain continually invests your energy in the hopes of earning a good return , such as food, shelter, affection, or physical protection , so you can perform nature’s most vital task: passing your genes to the next generation.” p10

• Like a muscle, we keep our brains healthy by challenging them – this develops and strengthens neuro-networks, which if not used, atrophy.  Novelty, facing new challenges, learning new things strengthens the brain and its neuro-networks. The brain, like one’s physical muscles, is a “use it or lose it” organ.  But a constant diet of novelty and “resilience-building” experiences without  adequate rest and recuperation can create a chronic stress that is damaging to the brain.  

• I kinda already knew this (from reading Descarte’s Error,) but LFB reinforces the point in terms that are easier for me to digest:  that the brain is a complex network of inter-dependent parts that work together in mysterious ways to give us our experience, AND the rest of the body is in on the conspiracy, sending and receiving signals that are outside our consciousness. There is an ecology to the brain whereby what happens in each part affects all the others.   AND the brain has a self-regulating adaptability that is key to survival, in which it constantly seeks to adapt to any change, injury, interruption that could hurt its chances to survive.  

——-

A brief summary of the 7 1/2 lessons – each Lesson gets its own chapter.

The Half-Lesson – your brain is not for thinking: this chapter walks us thru how the brain has evolved over the last half billion years.  She debunks the myth that our brain is for thinking – no, she says, its for optimizing our adaptation to our environment to help us better survive and pass our genes on to the next generation. 

Lesson 1: You have one brain, (not three) This chapter debunks the mythology of what she calls the “Triune” brain – broken up into three parts: a reasoning brain (prefrontal cortex), an emotional brain (limbic system), a primal or “Lizard” brain (amygdala).   Likewise, she debunks the Left-Brain/Right Brain dichotomy which I had take for fact, much influenced by my reading of Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind.  We do not store memories on our biological hard drive.  Nor does “System 2/System 2 thinking,” popularized by Daniel Kahneman reflect the biology of the brain.  She describes these as useful, but misleading metaphors. 

Lesson 2: Your Brain is a network:  This chapter like the others elaborates on its title. She describes the “network” as integrated, functioning as a single whole, and is  not separate sections functioning independently.  While she debunks useful but misleading metaphors as not reflecting how the brain works, she says that it is NOT a metaphor to say that the brain is a “network.”  To make her point she creates her own different metaphor – the global air travel system with hub and spoke airports.  Information can travel from one part of the brain by many different routes – it seeks the most efficient route, but if that’s broken, it finds another way. She calls our neurotransmitters the metaphorical airport staff.  

She defines neuro-plasticity as the ability of the brain to create new neurons and neuro-pathways that find ways to fire together to adapt to new requirements, new environments, new stimuli. She concludes this chapter by explaining how complex the brain is – it is more than the sum of its parts and can reconfigure itself to deal with new challenges and new stimuli. She also notes that the human brain is NOT the pinnacle of evolution; it has simply adapted itself to the environment it has found itself in over thousands of millennia.   She points to the Octopus with a complex brain distributed throughout its body – much better adapted to its environment than a human brain would be.

Lesson 3: Little Brains wire themselves to their world: This chapter is about the developing brain of the baby and child.  Her main point is in the title – the brain adapts itself – wires’ itself – to the world it finds itself in. She points to the false dichotomy of nature and nurture, noting that a child’s nature is to adapt to its environment (nurture), whatever it may be. “Genes play a key role in building a baby’s brain wiring, and they also open the door for us to wire her newborn brain in the context of her culture.”  The child’s brain changes and adapts to its environment – plasticity – and care givers are tuning and pruning the brain by conditioning it to budget its resources to survive and thrive.  The “pruning” is letting unused neural connections die off, to save energy and keep brain functioning as efficiently as possible.  

She talks about caregivers creating a niche that helps the child make sense of its world, and create an optimally efficient body budget of energy as it adapts. “Caregivers curate a baby’s physical and social niche, and the baby’s brain learns that niche.”- which becomes its “cultural intelligence.”  She also addresses how long term stress and neglect negatively influence the development of a child’s brain, and the potential role that generations-long poverty can play in stymying brain development. 

Lesson 4: Your brain predicts (almost) everything you do:  What we see, feel do in any situation is usually a result of predictions that our brain makes as a result of past experience.  “The last time I encountered a similar situation, when my body was in a similar state and was preparing this particular action, what did I see next? What did I feel next?….your brain combines information from outside and inside your head to produce everything you see hear, smell, taste, and feel.” p 67  It predicts what will happen next, based on subtle cues outside of our awareness, and also launches our next set of actions, often outside of our awareness.  

But she makes the point that we are not necessarily puppets on a string.  By broadening our horizons, knowledge and experience we can teach ourselves to intercept many of these automatic responses consciously.  “This is a form of free will….We can choose what we expose ourselves to.”p80   And this puts the responsibility on us to change how our brain automatically sees the world – we ourselves are the only ones who can choose to change these automatic perceptions. 

Lesson 5: Your brain secretly works with other brains:  We know that we are social animals but this chapter reinforces how our social interactions actually “tune and prune” our brains and the various manifestations of this “herd instinct” we have which is built into our DNA. We adapt ourselves unconsciously in many ways to the social environment we live in, even mirroring what we see, because we need and find a connection to other people in order to live. This  behavior is “choreographed” by our brains, outside of our daily awareness.

She points out that it is natural to have empathy with people who are iike us; a lot harder with people who are very different from us.  It’s harder to predict how people who are different will react, and metabolically it uses more energy for us to try to imagine someone’s suffering who is not like us. And metabolically, it much easier to be with people like us, who think and believe like us, which that leads to the “echo chambers” we read so much about in political discourse.  “Birds of a flock….”

She also talks about the power of words to impact our brains – the impact of the things we say on others – all based on our socially dependent nervous system. Being outside our comfort zone is like an exercise in learning and can be good for us.  To a point, stress can be good, we get better at learning and become more resilient.  New, unusual, or uncomfortable experiences help us to maintain that plasticity that we need to adapt; However, constant change and stress without recovery creates a deficit that can hurt us in the long run. 

Lesson 6; Brains Make More than One Kind of Mind: Interesting chapter in that it goes into the difference between “brain” and “mind.”  She tells us that “…a particular human brain in a particular  human body, raised and wired in a particular culture, will produce a particular kind of mind….We come into the world with a basic brain plan that can be wired in a variety of ways to construct different kinds of minds.” p100/101  She discusses “mood” as something common to all humans as a mental feeling that comes from how we feel – in mind and body. This is scientifically called affect which is the source of joy, sorrow, enjoyable or unpleasant experiences, profound or trivial experiences, transcendent or skeptical experiences. “Affect” is a sumary of what your body tells your brain is going on in the moment. “Affect is like a “barometer” for how you’re doing.” p106 

..this transformation from physical signals to mental feelings remains one of the great mysteries of consciousness..”p107 

And she discusses acculturation as adapting to changes in our environment – from work to home, as well as between greatly different cultures in the world.  And of course body budget plays a role – the brain struggles, uses energy, wants to be where things are easier, using less energy.  “Human Nature” is the exceptionally complex brain adapting itself as efficiently as it knows how, to its physical and social environment

Lesson 7:  Our brains can create reality:  “We live in a world of social reality that exists only inside our human brains.”p111   “Social Reality” is unique to humans and she attributes this reality to the 5 Cs:

• Creativity – our ability to create systems to make things that work, but which simply exist by agreement (eg, borders, money);
• Communication, our ability to communicate ideas such that people actually understand each other and thereby can co-create new realities;
• Copying, how we copy one another’s behaviors and actions to create norms that allow societies to function;
• Cooperation, our ability to work together to create economies and society – which are increasingly complex in the global environment; 
• Compression. A neural processes that filters, and summarizes massive amounts of neural (sensory) data as it gets sent to the frontal cortex, thus making it useful to interpret, understand and act on what we sense.  “Compression makes it possible for your brain to think abstractly, and abstraction, together with the rest of the Five Cs, empowers your large complex brain to create social reality.” p116

Abstraction is the ability to perceive meaning in symbols, art, other facets of our lives. 

“Compression enables sensory integration. Sensory integration enables abstraction. Abstaction permits your highly complex brain to issue flexible predictions based on the funcion of things rather than on their physical form. That is creativity….humans are the only animal whose brains have enough capacity for compression and abstraction to create social reality.”  p118-119

“Social reality is a superpower that emerges from an ensemble of human brains …We have more control over reality than we might think. We also have more responsibility for reality than we might realize…A superpower works best when you know you have it.”  p123 

Epilogue:  The Epilogue is a brief (2 page) overview, beginning with a list of 7 misunderstandings that most people have about themselves and “reality” based on misunderstanding of how the brain functions. She concludes that there is much still to learn about the brain.  But first, we must understand that the structure and functions of the brain itself are the source of our human strengths and foibles, and,  as she concludes, are  what “makes us simply, imperfectly, gloriously human.” p125.