Table of Contents

Primer: Our Human Brain Was Not Designed All at Once by a Genius Inventor on a Blank Sheet of Paper

David J. Linden 


Science Is an Ongoing Process, Not a Belief System

William B. Kristan, Jr., and Kathleen A. French 


Genetics Provides a Window on Human Individuality

Jeremy Nathans 19


Though the Brain Has Billions of Neurons, Wiring It All Up MayDepend upon Very Simple Rules

Alex L. Kolodkin 


From Birth Onward, Our Experience of the World Is Dominated by the Brain’s Continual Conversation with Itself

Sam Wang


Children’s Brains Are Different

Amy Bastian


Your Twelve-Year-Old Isn’t Just Sprouting New Hair but Is AlsoForming (and Being Formed by) New Neural Connections

Linda Wilbrecht 


How We Use Our Brain Can Change Its Basic Structural Organization

Melissa Lau and Hollis Cline 


Tool Use Can Instantly Change the Brain

Alison Barth 60


Life Experiences and Addictive Drugs Change Your Brain in Similar Ways

Julie Kauer 


Like It or Not, the Brain Grades on a Curve

Indira M. Raman 


The Brain Achieves Its Computational Power through a Massively Parallel Architecture

Liqun Luo 


The Brain Harbors Many Neurotransmitters

Solomon H. Snyder


The Eye Knows What Is Good for Us

Aniruddha Das


You Have a Superpower—It’s Called Vision

Charles E. Connor 


The Sense of Taste Encompasses Two Roles: Conscious Taste Perception and Subconscious Metabolic Responses

Paul A. S. Breslin 


It Takes an Ensemble of Strangely Shaped Nerve Endings to Build a Touch

David D. Ginty 


The Bane of Pain Is Plainly in the Brain

Allan Basbaum 


Time’s Weird in the Brain—That’s a Good Thing, and Here’s Why

Marshall G. Hussain Shuler and Vijay M. K. Namboodiri 


Electrical Signals in the Brain Are Strangely Comprehensible

David Foster 


A Comparative Approach Is Imperative for the Understanding of Brain Function

Cynthia F. Moss 


The Cerebellum Learns to Predict the Physics of Our Movements

Scott T. Albert and Reza Shadmehr 


Neuroscience Can Show Us a New Way to Rehabilitate Brain Injury: The Case of Stroke

John W. Krakauer 


Almost Everything You Do Is a Habit

Adrian M. Haith 


Interpreting Information in Voice Requires Brain Circuits for Emotional Recognition and Expression

Darcy B. Kelley 


Mind Reading Has Emerged at Least Twice in the Course of Evolution

Gül Dölen 


We Are Born to Help Others

Peggy Mason 201


Intense Romantic Love Uses Subconscious Survival Circuits in the Brain

Lucy L. Brown 


Human Sexual Orientation Is Strongly Influenced by Biological Factors

David J. Linden 


Deep Down, You Are a Scientist

Yael Niv 


Studying Monkey Brains Can Teach Us about Advertising

Michael Platt 


Beauty Matters in Ways We Know and in Ways We Don’t

Anjan Chatterjee 


“Man Can Do What He Wants, but He Cannot Will What He Wants”

Scott M. Sternson 


The Brain Is Overrated

Asif A. Ghazanfar 


Dopamine Made You Do It

Terence Sejnowski 


The Human Brain, the True Creator of Everything, Cannot Be Simulated by Any Turing Machine

Miguel A. L. Nicolelis 


There Is No Principle That Prevents Us from Eventually Building Machines That Think

Michael D. Mauk 


Epilogue

 © David J. Linden 2013