书籍介绍
这本书最锋利的地方，在于它彻底否定了'大脑是某副身体的专属配件'这一常识。作者把大脑称作一个'通用驾驶员'：它并不为手、眼或耳朵量身打造，而是学会驾驶任何接入的载具——生物躯体、机械义肢乃至虚拟化身。盲人用舌头'看'、聋者用皮肤'听'、截肢者操控假肢，都被解释为同一机制的例证。这一观点极具启发性，也引发争议：部分读者指出作者身上带有浓厚的硅谷技术极客与技术自由意志主义色彩，使其对未来的想象显得乐观甚至天真。它适合所有对'我究竟由什么构成'感到好奇的人阅读——你会获得一个看待自身的全新框架，而非一堆零散知识点。
作者简介
Dr. DAVID EAGLEMAN is a neuroscientist and internationally best-selling author. He teaches brain plasticity at Stanford University, is the creator and host of the Emmy-nominated television series The Brain, and is the CEO of Neosensory, a company that builds the next generation of neuroscience hardware. The author of seven previous books, Eagleman lives in Silicon Valley in California.
AI导读
核心看点
- 揭示大脑并非固定硬件，而是可动态重组的通用处理器
- 通过盲人用舌看世界等案例，生动阐释神经可塑性原理
- 提出大脑是即插即用外设的驾驶员，颠覆传统认知模型
读者共识
- 内容深入浅出，可读性极强，是优秀的神经学科普佳作
- 观点极具启发性，让人重新审视大脑的适应性与潜能
- 部分比喻带有硅谷技术自由主义色彩，需辩证看待
精彩摘录
- "In the 1930s and ’40s, a neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield... discovered that he could map the surface of the brain by stimulating different points... This led to the discovery of the 'homunculus'—a little man drawn across the surface of the brain. 在20世纪30和40年代，一位名叫维尔德·潘菲尔德的神经外科医生……发现他可以通过刺激不同的点来绘制"
- "When the first draft of the Human Genome Project came to completion at the turn of the millennium, one of the great surprises was that humans have only about twenty thousand genes... given the complexity of the brain and the body, it had been assumed that hundreds of thousands of genes would be requ"
- "Imagine this: instead of sending a four-hundred-pound rover vehicle to Mars, we merely shoot over to the planet a single sphere, one that can fit on the end of a pin. Using energy from sources around it, the sphere divides itself into a diversified army of similar spheres. The spheres hang on to eac"
- "The brain is not designed for the specific body it finds itself in. It is a general-purpose driver that can learn to operate any machinery it is plugged into, whether that’s a biological body, a robotic arm, or a virtual avatar. 大脑并非专门为它所处的特定身体而设计。它是一个通用的驾驶员，可以学会操作任何接入其中的机器，无论那是一个生物躯体、一条机械臂，还是一个虚拟化身"
- "The brain doesn’t know, or care, where the data comes from. Whatever information comes in, the brain figures out what to do with it... I call this the P-head model: the brain is a general-purpose computing device, and the eyes, ears, and nose are just plug-and-play peripheral devices. 大脑并不知道，也不在乎数据来"
- "In parallel with the factors at the level of the individual neurons, a larger-scale issue determines whether the whole system is flexible or locked down. There are two types of neurons: those that transmit messages that stimulate their neighbors (excitatory) and those that thwart their neighbors(inh"
- "Everything we saw in this chapter is fundamentally different from the way we build our current technologies. Engineers brag about intuitions of efficiency, minimum requirements, and cleanliness. Such a devotion to trimness achieves less wiring. But it also builds in an inability to balance on the ed"
- "For a person who goes blind, expanding the other senses takes on heightened relevance, and this is the deeper origin behind the changes that allow her visual cortex to be taken over. If a blind person passed her finger repeatedly over the bumps of Braille, but had no motivation to learn it, no rewir"
用户评论
可读性非常强的一本科普书，讲大脑的可塑性。通俗易懂却引人深思。
Neuropsych课的推荐 大脑真是自然届最最神奇的产物 尽管someday your brain will be the time-ossified snapshot that frustrates the next generation 我还是要趁年轻好好丰富它构建它
也比较浅
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