changeux

Brain development is crucial to our understanding of consciousness. "Epigenetic" is a key word for Changeux. The brain does not develop from a blueprint. Rather, it evolves in stages and experience and thought are crucial at each phase. The brain cannot evolve without thought and experience. Take language. There are windows of opportunity, which, if missed, do not reappear. Changeux sees the brain as reaching out to the world. Successful brains have been able to attain truth. At first, this happened through myth and religion. The brain is rewarded. But science is proving much more effective. Changeux is optimistic that evolution will favor scientific brains. Residual religious brains will be less competitive. His description of scientific thought as brain activity is mind-boggling. Neural darwinism, yes. But most important is his notion that experience and thought change the course of the brain's development. Brain differences no longer mean you were born this way or that. You become who you are and it shows in your brain.

consciousness lets us know when "now" is

We need consciousness in order to remember the past and imagine the future. If we did not have a sense of the present (that we have when waking) we would not be able to know "when" we are. Memories would seem like hallucinations, as would imagined events. Maybe this is what goes on in dreaming. Maybe being conscious requires a huge amount of energy so the brain stops doing it at night to save energy (and we begin to hallucinate = dreams).

brain not a sponge

Humphries, Proust and many others are reversing the way we see the brain. Rather than a passive receptor, we need to think of it as an active outreacher. The child's brain reaches out into the world to test it. The successfully fired neurons are strengthened, the less successful ones die out. Think of the brain as being like a squid with tentacles (neurons) reaching out into the world. For Humphries, the goes back to a simple organism recoiling from a threat. Proust describes how we create our loved ones in our mind then project out into the world. This is why someone "not our type" is perfect: we need to project their qualities.