A newborn baby cannot speak, it sees almost nothing, and controlled movements of its arms and legs are minimal. After being born he learns through significant changes in the brain. These are a condition for and also a result of this learning process.
The Ego is dead, long live the ego
The Ego does not exist, it is an illusion, a trick of the brain. This claim of neuroscientists may scare you. But is it true? Or does something like an ego exist? And if so, what is it?
Recognising faces
You walk down a street and nearly bump into someone; you look at their face and in a fraction of a second you know who it is. It does not really matter if you see them in profile or full face. And one can do this with thousands of faces; a clever trick of our brains. How do we recognise faces?
Autism is hereditary, but you don’t inherit autism
The probability of having autism is greater for an individual if it runs in their family. This suggests hereditary factors. But what do you actually inherit? What you inherit is a predisposition for a specific development of your brain. This, together with what you experience while growing up, can lead to the development of a mild to severe form of autism.
Let the sunshine in
How would we manage, if we could not visualise three-dimensional objects from flat two-dimensional diagrams? An amazing feat our brain performs. What role does predetermined programming play in this? That is related to how the sun shines on us.
The parable of the murderous brain
In a country with golden sand dunes by the sea, each year saw more murders committed than the year before. Neuroscientists had proven that the murderers brain made him commit the murder. The judges were stuck. How could they solve this problem?
Driving and memory
When you drive a car, you have to execute several actions at the same time, and also pay attention to traffic. For this to take place, most of your actions are performed automatically. These are laid down in a separate memory in a specific part of the brain: the corpus striatum.
Amazing and paradoxical
What is the relation between what the neurologist calls amazing and the psychiatrist paradoxical? Our impression of the world around us is not formed on the basis of what we actually perceive with our senses. Instead, we carry a preexisting image of our surroundings in our head, and we check if that matches with our perceptions. Sometimes this goes awry.