このエピソードについて
You're using it right now to read these words. It's generating your reaction to them. It is, by any measure, the most complex object in the known universe — and we still don't fully understand how it works.
Emma opens with the basics: 86 billion neurons, each connected to thousands of others, firing electrochemical signals at up to 120 metres per second. The total number of possible connections exceeds the number of atoms in the observable universe. Neev takes on the hard problem — not just how the brain processes information, but why any of that processing produces the subjective experience of being you. That question has defeated every philosopher and scientist who has seriously attempted it.
Lewis brings in the clinical reality: what strokes, injuries, and rare neurological conditions have taught us about which parts of the brain do what. The famous case of Phineas Gage — a railway worker who survived an iron rod through his frontal lobe in 1848, only to emerge a completely different person — changed neuroscience forever.
Emma closes with the frontier: what neuroimaging is revealing about memory, consciousness, and sleep, and why the brain remains, even now, more mystery than machine.
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