Name: Synaptic Self
ISBN: 9780142001783

Synaptic Self

"Synapses, the spaces between neurons, are the channels through which we think, act, imagine, feel, and remember. In short, they enable each of us to function as a single, integrated individual--from moment to moment, from year to year. Here, world-renowned brain expert Joseph LeDoux tells a groundbreaking and profound story: how the brain, and particularly its synapses, creates and maintains personality. Rather than taking sides in the age-old nature versus nurture debate, LeDoux illustrates how both contribute to synaptic connectivity and personality, broadening our understanding of who we are and what it means to be human."--Back cover.

What Hacker News says

drekkSep 2023

I like "Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are" by Joseph Ledoux. It's less pop science and gets into some detail about how our neurons work at the cellular level. He's not afraid to use doodles to communicate ideas and I found the whole thing a really pleasant read as a neuroscience undergraduate student. The only thing worth noting is it's from 2002, so it's drawing on older research and examples from the field.

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o-__-oDec 2019

Read synaptic self by Jason LaDuex[0], the leading theory for the last 20+ Years in the neuroscience field is that our consciousness is a sort of a reverb of electric signals between synapses. Rather than engaging in decisional thought, we are merely reacting to our environment and we think our decisions are ours but instead it’s the reverb during the delay of the electrical impulse to our muscles. So when you think “ I want to get off the couch”, your brain has already made the decision and your thought is occurring while the electrical signals are traveling to the necessary muscles to move.

Ends the idea of free-will, but considering we are all just chemical reactions at the biological level, makes sense..

[0] - Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are https://www.amazon.com/dp/0142001783

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