Empathy is a useful skill: by gaining a better grasp of what someone?

is feeling, it gives a better prediction about what they’ll do next.

We can’t help but simulate others, connect with others, care about

others, because we’re hardwired to be social creatures.

The world around you is a

large part of who you are. The self doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

Our inbuilt neural machinery drives us toward bonding with

others. It urges us to form groups.

We bind together through links of

family, friendship, work, style, sports teams, religion, culture, skin

pigment, language, hobbies, and political affiliation. It gives us

comfort to belong to a group – and that fact gives us a critical hint

about our species’ history.

Dehumanization(miejue人性) is a key component of genocide. Just as the Nazis

viewed the Jews as something less than human, the Serbs in former

Yugoslavia viewed the Muslims this way.

This war, like all others, was fueled by an effective form of neural

manipulation, one that’s been practiced for centuries: propaganda.

--the main news network, Radio Television of

Serbia, was controlled by the Serb government and consistently

presented distorted news stories as factual.

★Genocide is only possible when dehumanization happens on a

massive scale, and the perfect tool for this job is ★propaganda: it keys

right into the neural networks that understand other people, and dials

down the degree to which we empathize with them.

One of the most important things we learn as humans is perspective taking.?

★★When one is forced to understand what it’s like to stand in someone

else’s shoes, it opens up new cognitive pathways.?

Systems of rules can be arbitrary /'ɑ?b?t(r?)r?/ 主觀的,獨(dú)斷的.

Education plays a key role in preventing genocide. Only by

understanding the neural drive to form ingroups and outgroups – and

the standard tricks by which propaganda plugs into this drive – can we

hope to interrupt the paths of dehumanization that end in mass

atrocity.

Human brains are fundamentally wired to interact: we’re a?

splendidly social species.

transcend 超越

We can hack our own hardware to steer a course into the future.

Brain plasticity is also the key to our future, because it opens the

door to making modifications to our own hardware.

the brain is fundamentally unlike the hardware

in our digital computers. Instead, it’s “l(fā)iveware”. (半個(gè)腦子正常生活案例)

It reconfigures its

own circuitry. Although the adult brain isn’t quite as flexible as a

child’s, it still retains an astonishing ability to adapt and change.

The consequence I want to highlight is that there may be nothing

special or fundamental about the sensors we’re used to. They’re just

what we’ve inherited繼承 from a complex history of evolutionary

constraints. We’re not stuck with them.

If it sounds crazy to “see” through your tongue, just keep in mind

that ★seeing is never anything but electrical signals streaming into the

darkness of your skull.

The brain doesn’t care how it gets the information, as long as it gets it.

As we move into the future, we will

increasingly design our own sensory portals on the world. We will wire

ourselves into an expanded sensory reality.

How we sense the world is only half the story. The other half is how we

interact with it.?

paralysis? /p?'r?l?s?s/ 麻痹

In the distant future, we won’t just be extending our

physical bodies, but fundamentally our sense of self.?

exponentially 指數(shù) 指數(shù)的? /?eksp?'nen?(?)l/

What matters is not what a computer is made of, but how its parts interact.

To understand human consciousness, we may need to think not in

terms of the pieces and parts of the brain, but instead in terms of how

these components interact.