#david eagleman

And so you waited for death in order to wake up…

As activity passes through the brain, it changes the structure. From the point of view of the vast forest of neurons in your skull, the organisational problem is tremendous: the nervous system must physically change itself to optimally reflect the world in which it's embedded. The individual changes must each make the right contribution to the network to embody the new knowledge, and the changes must be positioned to make a difference to behaviour when the right moment arises, some time in the future. A simplifying error when thinking about memory has been to assume that it is underpinned by a single mechanism of change. The classical story of strengthening and weakening synapses has brought us a long way, and artificial neural networks employing those principles can perform impressive engineering feats. But memory is more than dialling synapses in a large connection diagram. As we saw, simple synaptic models quickly lose the capacity to represent old data as new data stream in. The way memories degrade— with older memories having more stability — reveals the secret of different timescales of change. The synaptic model would be convenient for neuroscientists and Al engineers, but it's almost certainly not natures approach. Instead, the changes underlying memory are distributed widely over titanic. numbers of neurons, synapses, molecules, and genes. By analogy, just consider how the desert remembers the wind: it does so in the slope of its sand dunes, in the shape of its rocks, and in the evolutionary pressures that carve the wings of its insects and the leaves of its plants.

Interesting parallels

"So you navigate your life with the help of others who held mirrors up for you. People praised your good qualities and criticised your bad habits, and these perspectives -often surprising to you - helped you to guide your life.

... the feelings produced by the physical states of the body come to guide behavior and decision-making.  Body states become linked to outcomes of events in the world.  When something bad happens, the brain leverages the entire body -- the heart rate, the contraction of the gut, weakness of the muscles, and so on -- to register that feeling.  And that feeling becomes associated with the event.  When the event is next pondered, the brain essentially runs a simulation, reliving the physical feelings of the event.  Those feelings then serve to navigate or at least bias subsequent decision-making.