The brain is never the same from one moment to the next throughout life.
excerpts from the linked interview
Adolfo: Your more recent reflections on brain plasticity, particularly how it shapes our perception of time due to the brain’s constant remodeling, caught my attention. Can you elaborate on how this plasticity specifically influences our sense of time?
Alvaro: Time is an aspect, a component, essential to understanding the human brain. It’s often not sufficiently considered because it adds a dimension that makes it more complex. And, as you know, we humans tend to simplify. But I think the philosophy of Heraclitus’s Panta Rei (everything flows) describes precisely what happens in the nervous system. The brain is never the same from one moment to the next throughout life. Never ever. That is the first law.
The second law: The brain never goes back. It never undoes the path it has walked. First and foremost, because there is no such path. … What does exist is the possibility of making a change with which you functionally “go back” to a state like the one you had before. The outcome might be the same, but the brain uses a different pathway to get there. It is a change that makes the representation of what appears functionally the same, in reality, turn out to be different. That is, you cannot redo or retake the trace you had, but you can make a new trace.
This principle, where the outcome remains similar but the underlying process changes, is a hallmark of the brain’s remarkable plasticity.
The third law — the third reality — is that time in the brain is a very particular thing because “now” does not really exist. I may be saying “now,” but I’ve already thought about it and, in the best case, it has taken me 30 milliseconds to finish that processing and send the message to my larynx to come out. … And you heard it and it has taken you at least another 30 milliseconds to integrate it and process it, and then another 30 milliseconds to decode it.
My now and your now are at best hundreds of milliseconds out of phase and thus “present” is effectively not a shared reality between the two of us.
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I think the brain works by creating hypotheses about what it is going to find and then it contrasts those hypotheses with what it actually finds. It is not a receptive chamber of information. It is an active projection that it compares with the reality it encounters.
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The reality is that the ability to read the brain and influence activity is already here. It’s no longer only in the realm of science fiction. Now, the question is, what exactly can we access and manipulate in the brain?
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I think we already have technology that allows us to read and write in the brain, extract information from our brain and manage it in a way that could compromise, at least potentially, the independence, privacy, and agency of each of us. … Anything that interferes with that (to do and decide for oneself) poses a potential risk to the very essence of human rights. In other words, a new list of human rights would have to be developed and expanded by Neurorights.