To empathize with another person is to literally feel their pain. You run a compelling simulation of what it would be like if you were in that situation. Our capacity for this is why stories – like movies and novels – are so absorbing and so pervasive across human culture. Whether it’s about total strangers or made-up characters, you experience their agony and their ecstasy. You fluidly become them, live their lives, and stand in their vantage points. When you see another person suffer, you can try to tell yourself that it’s their issue, not yours – but neurons deep in your brain can’t tell the difference.

This built-in factory to feel another person’s pain is part of what makes us so good at stepping out of our shoes and into their shoes, neurally speaking. But why do we have this facility in the first place? From an evolutionary standpoint of view, empathy is a useful skill: by gaining a better prediction about what they’ll do next. However, the accuracy of empathy is limited, and in many cases we simply project ourselves onto others.

The Brain: The Story of You
David Eagleman

Background on David Eagleman

Your Brain – Your Storyteller

Your brain serves up a narrative – and each of us believes whatever narrative it tells. Whether you’re falling for a visual illusion, or believing the dream you happen to be trapped in, or experiencing letters in color (synethesia), or accepting a delusion as true during an episode of schizophrenia, we each accept our realities however our brains script them.

Despite the feeling that we’re directly experiencing the world out there, our reality is ultimately built in the dark, in a foreign language of electrochemical signals. The activity churning across vast neural networks gets turned into your story of this, your private experience of the world: the feeling of a book in your hands, the smell of roses, the sound of others speaking.

Even more strangely, it’s likely that every brain tells a slightly different narrative. For every situation with multiple witnesses, different brains are having different private subjective experiences. With seven billion human brains wandering the planet (and trillions of animal brains), there’s no single version of reality. Each brain carries its own truth.

So what is reality? It’s like a television set show that only you can see, and you can’t turn it off. The good news is that it happens to be broadcasting the most interesting show you could ask for: edited, personalized, and presented just for you.

The Brain: The Story of You
David Eagleman

David Eagleman
born 1971

. David Eagleman website
. Eagleman Laboratory for Perception and Action
. Wikipedia

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and writer, serving as an adjunct associate professor at Stanford University in the department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences. He also independently serves as the director of the Center for Science and Law.

Eagleman is known for his work on brain plasticity, time perception, synesthesia, and neurolaw. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a council member in the World Economic Forum, and a New York Times bestselling author published in 28 languages.

He is the writer and presenter of the international PBS series, The Brain with David Eagleman, and the author of the companion book, The Brain: The Story of You.

Eagleman has over 100  academic publications, and he has published many popular books. His bestselling book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, explores the neuroscience “under the hood” of the conscious mind: all the aspects of neural function to which we have no awareness or access. His work of fiction, SUM: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, is an international bestseller published in 28 languages and turned into two operas.

Books written by David Eagleman include:

• Brain and Behavior: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective
• Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
• Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
• The Brain: The Story of You
• The Runaway Species: How human creativity remakes the world
• Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia (MIT Press)

The eye is a simple optical instrument. With internal images projected from objects in the outside world, it is Plato’s cave with a lens. The brain is the engine of understanding. There is nothing closer to our intimate experiences, yet the brain is less understood and more mysterious than a distant star.

We have only to open our eyes, and spread before us lies a banquet of colors and shapes, shadows, and textures: a pageant of rewarding and threatening objects, miraculously captured by sight. All this, from two tiny distorted upside-down patterns of light in the eyes. Seeing is so familiar, apparently so easy, it takes a leap of imagination to appreciate that the eyes set extremely difficult problems for the brain to solve for seeing to be possible.

Light does not enter or leave the brain, locked privily in its box of bone. All the brain receives are minute electrochemical pulses of various frequencies, as signals from the senses. The signals must be read by rules and knowledge to make sense. Yet what we see, and what we know, can be very different. As science advances, differences between perceived appearances and accepted realities become even greater.

What is striking is the huge amount of brain contributing to vision, giving immense added value to the images of the eyes. Where does this added value come from? Even in ideal conditions object perception is far richer than any possible images in the eyes. The added value must come from dynamic brain processes, employing knowledge stored from the past, to see the present, and predict the immediate future. Prediction has immense survival value. It makes fast games possible in spite of the physiological delays from eye to brain, and brain to hand. Moreover, anticipating dangers and potential rewards is  essential for survival — made possible by buying time from seeing objects distant in space.

Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing, Fifth Edition (Princeton Science Library)
Richard L. Gregory
.
Background on Richard Gregory

The great invention of eyeglasses was not based on the science of the time, but from craftsmen playing about with lenses, probably Venetian glass workers in about 1286. This made spectacles socially suspect to the aristocracy for hundreds of years, and unfortunately scholars associated weak eyes with weak brains, so they were worn in secret. The earliest spectacles were convex, for short sight. Concave glasses were not available before the middle of the fifteenth century.

Eyeglasses are perhaps the invention, next only to fire, that brings most aid and comfort. And what else works forever with no maintenance and no energy costs? Spectacles lengthen our effective lives as with their aid we can see to read and perform skilled tasks into old age. Before they were available, scholars and craftsmen were made helpless by lack of sight just as their skills matured.

The discovery that the lens of the eye works by simple physics — exactly like a glass lens — opened the mind to seeing our bodies as understandable through experiments and by analogies with the physical world. Seeing the eyes’ lenses as within physics, was a significant step away from the vitalism which blocked biological understanding, holding that every aspect of life is essentially unique and so beyond explanation. Our uniqueness is surely being able to question and discover, and sometimes to explain ourselves and what we see.

Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing, Fifth Edition (Princeton Science Library)
Richard L. Gregory
.
Background on Richard Gregory