PBS explores the inner cosmos in 'The Brain'
A popularly-held belief has it that we as humans use only 10 percent of our brains. Dr. David Eagleman, neuroscientist, Guggenheim Fellow and host of the six-part PBS series “The Brain With David Eagleman,” asserts that that is nothing but bunk. “We use 100 percent of our brains all the time,” he says. “Your brain is screaming with activity right now. Actually, if I sit in the corner and I just feel like I’m spacing out and not doing anything, my brain is on fire with activity all the time. That myth, I think, sticks around because it gives this sense of hope, as in, ‘Oh, you can be a lot smarter.’ ” The series, which airs Wednesdays beginning Oct. 14 (check local listings), looks at the three pounds of tissue in our skulls not as a piece of anatomy but what it means to the human experience. By combining scientific facts with personal stories and visual effects, the program exposes the brain’s inner workings and endeavors to answer fundamental questions such as “What is reality?” “What makes me me?” “Who is in control?” and “How do I decide?” And the process of decision-making, according to Eagleman, isn’t as simple as, well, making a decision. “The easy intuition is, OK, well, I have a mind and I make a decision. I decide something,” he says. “But the truth is that your brain is more like a team of rivals where you have different neural networks that are battling it out in any situation. “So if I put some chocolate chip cookies in front of you,” he continues, “part of you wants to eat it. It’s a rich energy source. Part of you doesn’t want to eat it for health reasons. And you can argue with yourself and cajole yourself and make contracts with yourself, get angry at yourself – who’s talking with whom? – it’s all different parts of you. You have many drives that are all trying to be in control, and so ... really what you’ve got is this neural parliament running under the hood that you don’t really have access to.” Ultimately, Eagleman’s goal with “The Brain” is to give viewers a journey into themselves. “It would be to sail into this inner cosmos that makes us up, and it’s all alien stuff that you find in there and yet it is you,” he says. “When we ask the question nowadays of ‘Who Am I?’ ‘What makes me me?’ to my mind the most interesting answer to that question has to do with going inside and looking at what’s happening in just these three pounds of alien computational material.”