Lisa Barrett

Faces are constantly moving, and your brain relies on many different factors at once—body posture, voice, the overall situation, your lifetime of experience—to figure out which movements are meaningful and what they mean.14

you must show that no other explanations can account for your results.

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.