How the Human Brain Contends With the Strangeness of Zero | Quanta Magazine

The good side of things is that, because our circuits freeze up, we get to keep, for our entire lives, a stable, unconscious synaptic trace of what we learned as children.

Your brain is a giant of its own, made up of a network of 86 billion neurons.10 An isolated neuron is pretty useless. But by communicating with one another, a group of neurons can move upward on the Emergence Tower and combine into a single thinking system that’s far more powerful than the sum of its parts: the brain.

Scientific revolutions tend to emerge not from a sudden discovery but by asking better questions

During research conducted with the neuroscientist Keiko Yamasuki, he discovered that brain activity for thoughts and memories operated on the quantum level rather than on the molecular level as previously believed.

And while the nervous system extends throughout the body, and is tuned by environmental and social factors, today’s science rightly insists that the brain—and its contribution to curiosity—is importantly unique.

Neuroscientists now think of the brain as an ever-changing ecosystem crackling with electrochemical energy from which our thoughts, emotions, and intentions arise, rather than a collection of blinking neural islands.