david-eagleman

One of the seats of emotion and memory in the brain is the amygdala, he explained. When something threatens your life, this area seems to kick into overdrive, recording every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. "This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older," Eagleman said--why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we__e dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.

As your trillions of new connections continually form and re-form, the distinctive pattern means that no one like you has ever existed, or will ever exist again. The experience of your conscious awareness, right now, is unique to you. And because the physical stuff is constantly changing, we are too. We__e not fixed. From cradle to grave, we are works in progress.

So why does the world appear stable to you when you__e looking at it? Why doesn__ it appear as jerky and nauseating as the poorly filmed video? Here__ why: your internal model operates under the assumption that the world outside is stable. Your eyes are not like video cameras _ they simply venture out to find more details to feed into the internal model. They__e not like camera lenses that you__e seeing through; they__e gathering bits of data to feed the world inside your skull." The Brain: The Story of You - David Eagleman

The brain, he writes, is like Kublai Khan, the great Mongol emperor of the thirteenth century. It sits enthroned in its skull, "encased in darkness and silence," at a lofty remove from brute reality. Messengers stream in from every corner of the sensory kingdom, bringing word of distant sights, sounds, and smells. Their reports arrive at different rates, often long out of date, yet the details are all stitched together into a seamless chronology. The difference is that Kublai Khan was piecing together the past. The brain is describing the present__rocessing reams of disjointed data on the fly, editing everything down to an instantaneous now. How does it manage it?