The book "The Almighty Brain. Guide to the most indispensable organ of our body "

What makes us us? Where does the thought begin? Reason and memory, love and hate, logic and learnability - the elements that make up our "I" are in the most irreplaceable organ of our body - the brain. Get ready to go on a fascinating journey through the brain and find out where a person is, why it is important to be able to forget which part of the brain hides the compass, where false memories come from, where emotions are stored and whether you can affect your mood, and even why we eat the brain.

“This book is written as if I were talking about my brain with my close friends, and I really hope that you, like me, will be fascinated by its many secrets.

Brain Taxi Drivers

Is it possible to train the hippocampus? Brain researchers from the University of London asked this question and found the ideal test subjects in their city. London - a continuous maze of streets. It does not have such a clear development plan as Paris or New York. In many respects, London is like Oslo, only it is much, much more. A taxi driver in London should remember 25,000 streets, as well as thousands of tourist attractions and other important places. To navigate in a large and complex city, you need to spend from two to four years of study. And even after that, the percentage of errors in the entrance exam is nearing 50.

When scientists from the University of London scanned the brain of the subjects - taxi drivers and the brain of subjects from the control group of the same age and IQ, it turned out that the back of the hippocampus is much larger among drivers. However, has it increased as a result of training or does the large hippocampus help you become a driver? Most likely the first, since the largest hippocampus was among the taxi drivers with the longest experience, while the drivers with the smallest experience were smaller. Further evidence was provided a few years later. The same group of scientists scanned the brains of people who trained as taxi drivers before and after the courses. Those who have passed the exam after graduation, the hippocampus became larger. New neural connections formed - or maybe even new neurons? After all, the hippocampus is one of the few areas of the brain where new neurons can form. This study is one of the most striking examples of how experience forms our brain.
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Love the brain

Love makes our heart beat faster, and excitement - our voice trembles, and before the first date we often have to run to the toilet. Therefore, we often associate emotions with bodily sensations. For example, we say that we love someone with all our hearts, or that “the ground has disappeared from under our feet”.

If we had no brain, we would not be able to love. But what exactly in the brain is responsible for love - we still do not know. It is precisely known that love is a complex and multicomponent feeling. This is not fear or anger, mostly limited to the amygdala in the temporal lobe. By studying the images of the brain, we can trace which parts of the brain are activated when a person loves someone, and practically the whole brain glows in these images. And parts of the cerebral cortex, especially the insular lobe, and deeper and more primitive parts of the brain, such as the basal ganglia, and the limbic system are activated when we love someone. All of these areas of the brain have something in common - they are rich in dopamine, an important part of the reward system.

Love has such a high priority and requires the activity of so many areas of the brain because love is of great importance for our species from the point of view of gene reproduction and transmission.

Because after we find a partner and go through the stage of courtship, we have to live with him practically all our life. However, not all mammals spend their whole life with one partner. In fact, only 5%. For example, coyotes. As researchers have found, coyotes with a well-functioning mechanism for releasing the love hormone oxytocin from brain neurons are more faithful to their partners. Coyotes who do not have a well-functioning mechanism change their partners more often. In both humans and coyotes, oxytocin is also released during childbirth, care for offspring and feeding.

Oxytocin in the brain contributes to our attachment to each other.

An example comparable to coyotes: men with a naturally low level of oxytocin are less likely to marry. However, oxytocin mixed into nasal drops will not make the partner more true. And the arrows of Cupid will not turn a disinterested person in love. Both brain and love are much more complicated, and oxytocin is only one of the details of the mosaic. Another detail that also helps us in finding what we want is dopamine, part of the reward system.

However, love can be different, not only romantic. Thanks to parental love, we are able to withstand sleepless nights and around-the-clock childcare in order to pass on our set of genes. Parental love activates a particular subcortical area, namely the gray matter surrounding the brain's water supply (near-conductive gray matter).

When the work on the book came to the finish line, our daughter decided to be born - almost two and a half months ahead of schedule. She was placed in a toilet for premature babies and provided with everything needed. They carefully controlled the temperature, fed through a tube a special food, developed by nutritionists, and supplied oxygen through tubes inserted into the nose. While I was sitting in the library of the hospital and finishing writing a book, it occurred to me that the hospital would not be able to provide her with everything necessary. In the articles on which I relied when writing this section about the brain and about love, it was said that without love and care, the brain of children turns out to be underdeveloped. Food, heat and air is not enough. It is not enough that I took omega-3 fatty acids and decanted milk every three hours so that my daughter could get it through a probe. She did not feel my love, she needed contact with her mother, as in the womb.

At birth, the brain is not fully developed, even if the child was born on time. The brain develops through interaction with other people. Lack of interaction leads to inadequate development. In the middle of the last century, many people, independently of each other, began to notice that children in hospitals and orphanages become sluggish, lose their skills and stop gaining weight. Some even died. All these children received food, clothing, and warmth, but not love. The children simply melted, sitting on the bed with a completely indifferent facial expression. They stopped walking and talking. The doctor Rene Spitz shot these children on film. The results of his work showed that children need love and care in order to develop normally. It was later discovered that the brain of emotionally deprived children weakened so much that it really became smaller than in children who grew up with loving parents. Children learn when they are given a smile, when they try to take their first steps or when they are comforted by a fall.

Learning leads to the fact that hundreds of thousands of new neural connections are formed in the brain, in such a large number that it becomes noticeable both in gray and white matter and, as already mentioned, even affects the size of the brain.

The first two years of a child’s life is a victory or a failure of all new neural connections. Those connections that are not used are lost.

Later studies were conducted, showing that there are still differences in brain development, even when children are not completely deprived of emotionally. People can not be equally good and caring, and there is a difference between several dozen employees working in shifts in an orphanage, and one regular tutor who is always in place. A group of scientists by lot determined which of the children would go to foster families and who would stay in the orphanage. Later it turned out that children who were in foster families had a higher IQ.

Our brain decides who we are and how we exist in this world. Insufficient brain development will affect all areas of life. Children who received love during growth and development will not only be smarter, but also more social and empathic than those who have not received enough care and love.

»More information about the book can be found on the publisher's website.
» Table of Contents
» Excerpt

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