What surprised me most was the price of the book. $19.95 (originally $24) for a 123-pager (180 pages including epilogue, appendix and index).  It is the first time I’ve had to evaluate a book by its price. The first sentence of the book is “I wrote this book of short, informal essays to intrigue and entertain you.” This means several jargons would appear, but otherwise be illustrative and casual. Too casual.

On page 26 was the concept of body budgeting. It’s basically a notion that seems apt to slap onto anything. All of brain’s wiring and computation as well as the corresponding bodily actions are a result of body budgeting – some algorithm that the brain is trained to maximize the odds of achieving the objective function.

Some bullet points

– The brain is like a collection of neurons grouped into clusters so that individual neurons don’t have to communicate with too many counterparts.

– “Overall, no neuron has a single psychological function, though a neuron may be more likely to contribute to some functions than others. … I’m not saying that every neuron can do everything, but any neuron can do more than one thing. … Even a simple, reaching action like this, when done more than once, can be guided by different sets of nuance. This phenomenon is called degeneracy.”

– “A brain doesn’t store memories like files in a computer – it reconstructs them on demand with electricity and swirling chemicals. We call this process remembering, but it’s really assembling. A complex brain can assemble many more memories than either meatloaf brain or pocket knife brain could. And each time you have the same memory, your brain may have assembled it with a different collection of neurons. (That’s degeneracy)

– Experiencing poverty, e.g. insufficient food, too much street noise, lack of warmth or ventilation – will mold the body budgeting mechanism in a way that could be inefficient in different circumstances.

– “At the front of your brain, the largest, most highly connected neurons produced your most abstract, multi sensory summaries. That’s why you can view the dissimilar objects like flowers and gold watches as similar and view an identical cup of wine as either celebratory or sacred.”

– “back of the brain: smaller nuances, fewer connections, representing sensory details”

– “front of the brain: larger, nuances, more connections, representing the most compressed summaries”

– “It’s important to understand that the human brain doesn’t seem to distinguish between different sources of chronic stress. If your body budget is already depleted by the circumstances of life-like physical illness, financial hardship, hormone surges, or simply not sleeping or exercising enough-your brain becomes more vulnerable to stress of all kinds.”

Who would I recommend this book to? Someone who never took the most basic biology class, nor anything pertaining to the brain, and has multiple twenties lying around. 

2/5