The history of understanding that there is an unconscious that’s riding under the radar of conscious awareness is such a new idea, historically. Several hundred years ago, people got pieces and parts of the idea, but it wasn’t until Freud that he really nailed it.
“Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.” — David Eagleman
Neuroscience has drifted off a little bit from the directions that Freud was going in terms of the interpretations of whether your unconscious mind is sending you particular hidden signals and so on. But the idea that there’s this massive amount happening under the hood, that part was correct and so Freud really nailed that. And he lived before the blossoming of modern neuroscience, so he was able to do this just by outside observation and looking at how people acted.
The Connectome: Mapping the Brain
Nowadays, we’re able to peer noninvasively inside people’s heads as they’re doing tasks, as they’re thinking about things and making decisions, perceiving the world. We’re able to go a lot deeper into understanding this massive machinery under the hood. Groundbreaking neuroscience confirms what Sigmund Freud first theorized: that what we believe to be the objective reality surrounding us is actually formed by our subconscious. David Eagleman, who wrote and filmed a 2015 PBS documentary on our “inner cosmos,” explains:
“Neuroscience has drifted off a little bit from the directions that Freud was going in terms of the interpretations of whether your unconscious mind is sending you particular hidden signals and so on. But the idea that there’s this massive amount happening under the hood, that part was correct and so Freud really nailed that. And he lived before the blossoming of modern neuroscience, so he was able to do this just by outside observation and looking at how people acted. Nowadays, we’re able to peer noninvasively inside people’s heads as they’re doing tasks, as they’re thinking about things and making decisions, perceiving the world. We’re able to go a lot deeper into understanding this massive machinery under the hood.”
Time, for example, is supposed to be an objective measurement, but we experience it subjectively.
“David Eagleman’s wide-ranging roundup of the current state of knowledge about the brain is concise, accessible and often very surprising. It’s a strange new world inside your head.” – Brian Eno
Join David Eagleman for an exhilarating tour into the inner cosmos that generates your reality. In the infinitely dense tangle of billions of brain cells and their trillions of connections, I hope you’ll be able to squint and make out something that you might not have expected to see in there. You.
Six one-hour episodes that tell the story of the inner workings of the brain and take viewers on a visually spectacular journey into why they feel and think the things they do.
Six one-hour episodes tell the story of the inner workings of the brain and take viewers on a journey into their thoughts, actions, and beliefs. This epic series focuses on the basic questions of being human, going into the inner cosmos to explore questions from the meaning of reality to the behavior of societies. In a cubic centimeter of brain tissue there are as many connections as stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. Our thoughts, our hopes, and our dreams are contained in these three pounds of wet biological material.
I hope that when you watch THE BRAIN, they will take away a new love of science and sense of awe at the human condition.
Part 1/6 – What Is Reality?
Dr. Eagleman takes viewers on an extraordinary journey that explores how the brain, locked in silence and darkness without direct access to the world, conjures up the rich and beautiful world we all take for granted
Part 2/6 What makes Me?
Episode two, “What Makes Me?”, explores the question of how the brain gives rise to our thoughts, emotions, our memories and personality. Philosophers and great thinkers have for millennia pondered the question of how physical stuff can give rise to mental processes.
Part 3/6 – Who Is in Control
A scientific look into the control aspect of the brain/mind. Does free will exist? Are we entirely the products of our genes and our environment. Does our unconscious mind make most of our decisions?
Part 4/6 – How Do I Decide?
The human brain is the most complex object we’ve discovered in the universe, and every day much of its neural circuitry is taken up with the tens of thousands of decisions we need to make
Part 5/6 – Why Do I Need You?
In “Why Do I Need You?” Dr. David Eagleman explores how the human brain relies on other brains to thrive and survive. This neural interdependence begins at birth. Dr. Eagleman invites a group of babies to a puppet show to showcase their ability to discern who is trustworthy, and who isn’t.
Part 6/6 – Who Will I Be?
In “Who Will We Be?” Dr. Eagleman journeys into the future, and asks what’s next for the human brain, and for our species. Mother nature has evolved a brain that is able to rewire itself according to its environment, which means that as technological advances continue apace, our technology is on a crash course with our biology