Points from the Videos about Human Capabilities
- The brain is made up of about 100 billion neurons, or nerve cells, each of which may form connections with perhaps one thousand other neurons.
- Your brain constructs or creates a "body image" or sensory awareness of your own physiological parts, processes, etc.
- "Phantom" pain from a missing or amputated limb provides an example of the fact that "pain" is a nervous system construct. The nervous system (brain) can be fooled with different types of visual stimulation, which further illustrates how the brain responds to the outside environment.
- Francis Crick's "Astonishing Hypothesis" about human consciousness states that everything that defines "you" — "your feelings, what you see, what you hear, what you do — is due to the action of nerve cells inside your brain."
- The human brain has been evolving over 500 million years, but each individual brain also evolves over the course of an individual lifetime. Personal experiences mold and shape the brain. We are not predestined creatures.
- To what degree are we not only constrained or limited by our genes, but also imprisoned by the environments we experience, e.g., poverty, violence, prejudice?
To varying degrees, we each have common human capabilities, and limitations: we have imperfect sensing capabilities; nervous systems that can mislead and misinform us; physiological and cognitive limitations. In this respect we are all "in the same boat," but yet individually we are each unique human beings with different-sized and types of paddles. If we don't acknowledge our common, and unique, abilities and limitations, we will misunderstand our perceptions of the world around us.
Jeff Hawkins Videos Christof Koch Videos V.S. Ramachandran Videos
