The connected self

摘要

We moderns believe that our momentary, subjective experience is intimately linked to events in the brain. One set of neurons fires, and we perceive an apple's colour, while a different population of cells gives rise to its taste. Yet the self is also stable: turn the brain off, as happens during heart surgery when the body is cooled to frigid temperatures, and on recovery, the patients character, personality, habits and long-term memories remain intact. It is these stable aspects of the self, rather than the ebb and flow of our thoughts and percepts, that physicist-turned-neuroscientist Sebastian Seung seeks to explain in Connectome.