Lisa Barrett

ll of it nonstop for seventy-two years

primary somatosensory cortex.

The biological building blocks are the same; what differs is the timing.

Hub damage is associated with depression, schizophrenia, dyslexia, chronic pain, dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and other disorders.

Similarly, when babies are born with dense cataracts, meaning the brain receives no visual input, neurons in the visual cortex become repurposed for other senses.

Degeneracy in the brain means that your actions and experiences can be created in multiple ways.

complexity. It is a brain’s ability to configure itself into an enormous number of distinct neural patterns.

complexity is a critical ingredient for these capabilities, and the human brain has it in abundance.

Complexity means your brain can create massive numbers of different patterns by combining bits and pieces of old patterns it has made before

when existing brain parts become more flexible, the result is much more complexity than we get by accumulating new parts.