The Story of Us
As your brain will continue to move throughout your life, your identity is essentially no different from a shifting target, it has no final destination.
The young brain is gradually kneading to adapt to its environment in time intervals because it is not unchangeable, but flexible in the face of life.
Genes provide very general instructions regarding the regulation of neural networks, and the fine-tuning of the networks is done by experience, allowing the brain to adapt to local conditions and details.
We characterize things that can be shaped and preserve this form as “plastic.” The brain is one of them, even in adulthood: Experience changes the brain and this change is preserved.
What we are like in adolescence is not simply the result of a choice or attitude, but an intense and inevitable period of brain change.
Memory is not a precise video recording of a snapshot in your life, but a fragile cerebral state of the past; you have to resurrect it to remember.
In fact, what makes you who you are is not what develops in your brain, but is destroyed in your brain.
The notes I took from David Eagleman’s book The Brain: The Story of you.
