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Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are Hardcover – February 7, 2012
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- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHoughton Mifflin Harcourt
- Publication dateFebruary 7, 2012
- Dimensions6.25 x 1 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-109780547508184
- ISBN-13978-0547508184
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Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We AreHardcover
Editorial Reviews
Review
“the best lay book on brain science I’ve ever read.” — Wall Street Journal by Daniel Levitin, Professor, McGill University; author of This Is Your Brain on Music and The World in Six Songs.
“This is complicated stuff, and it is a testament to Dr. Seung’s remarkable clarity of exposition that the reader is swept along with his enthusiasm, as he moves from the basics of neuroscience out to the farthest regions of the hypothetical, sketching out a spectacularly illustrated giant map of the universe of man.” — New York Times
“[A] bracing, mind-expanding report from neuroscience’s razor edge. Accessible, witty, [e]minently logical and at times poetic, Connectome establishes Seung as an important new researcher, philosopher and popularizer of brain science. It puts him on par with cosmology’s Brian Greene and the late Carl Sagan.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Seung argues intelligently and powerfully that the self lies in the totality of the brain’s wiring.” — Nature by Christof Koch, Professor, California Institute of Technology; Chief Scientific Officer, Allen Institute for Brain Science; author of Quest for Consciousness and Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist
“With the first-person flavour of James Watson’s Double Helix—an account of how DNA’s structure was discovered—Connectome gives a sense of the excitement on the cutting edge of neuroscience.” — NewScientist by Terry Sejnowski, Professor and Director, Computational Neurobiology Lab, Salk Institute; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Member, National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering USA.
“an elegant primer on what’s known about how the brain is organized and how it grows, wires its neurons, perceives its environment, modifies or repairs itself, and stores information. Seung is a clear, lively writer who chooses vivid examples.” — Washington Post
From the Inside Flap
We know that each of us is unique, but science has struggled to pinpoint where, precisely, our uniqueness resides. Is it in our genes? The structure of our brains? Our genome may determine our eye color and even aspects of our personality. But our friendships, failures, and passions also shape who we are. The question is: how?
Sebastian Seung, a dynamic professor at MIT, is on a quest to discover the biological basis of identity. He believes it lies in the pattern of connections between the brains neurons, which change slowly over time as we learn and grow. The connectome, as its called, is where our genetic inheritance intersects with our life experience. Its where nature meets nurture.
Seung introduces us to the dedicated researchers who are mapping the brains connections, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse. It is a monumental undertakingthe scientific equivalent of climbing Mount Everestbut if they succeed, it could reveal the basis of personality, intelligence, memory, and perhaps even mental disorders. Many scientists speculate that people with anorexia, autism, and schizophrenia are wired differently, but nobody knows for sure. The brains wiring has never been seen clearly.
In sparklingly clear prose, Seung reveals the amazing technological advances that will soon help us map connectomes. He also examines the evidence that these maps will someday allow humans to upload their minds into computers, achieving a kind of immortality.
Connectome is a mind-bending adventure story, told with great passion and authority. It presents a daring scientific and technological vision for at last understanding what makes us who we are. Welcome to the future of neuroscience.
From the Back Cover
A landmark work, gorgeously written. No other researcher has traveled as deeply into the brain forest and emerged to share its secrets.David Eagleman, author of Incognito and Sum
Connectomics is emerging as a crucial and exhilarating field of study. Sebastian Seung takes you by the hand and shows you why. Connectome is a page-turnera book that should be read by anyone who lays claim to be thinking about the nature of life.Michael Gazzaniga, University of California at Santa Barbara, author of Human and Whos in Charge?
Sebastian Seung scales the heights of neuroscience and casts his brilliant eye around, describing the landscape of its past and boldly envisioning a future when we may understand our own brains and thus ourselves.Kenneth Blum, executive director, Center for Brain Science, Harvard University
Sebastian Seung can do it all. Hes widely recognized as a superb physicist, a whiz with computers, and a path-breaking neuroscientist. Connectome shows that hes also a terrific writer, as inspiring as he is clear and good-humored.Steven Strogatz, Cornell University, author of Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
No road, no trail can penetrate this forest. The long and delicate branches of its trees lie everywhere, choking space with their exuberant growth. No sunbeam can fly a path tortuous enough to navigate the narrow spaces between these entangled branches. All the trees of this dark forest grew from 100 billion seeds planted together. And, all in one day, every tree is destined to die.
This forest is majestic, but also comic and even tragic. It is all of these things. Indeed, sometimes I think it is everything. Every novel and every symphony, every cruel murder and every act of mercy, every love affair and every quarrel, every joke and every sorrow — all these things come from the forest.
You may be surprised to hear that it fits in a container less than one foot in diameter. And that there are seven billion on this earth. You happen to be the caretaker of one, the forest that lives inside your skull. The trees of which I speak are those special cells called neurons. The mission of neuroscience is to explore their enchanted branches — to tame the jungle of the mind (see Figure 1).
Neuroscientists have eavesdropped on its sounds, the electrical signals inside the brain. They have revealed its fantastic shapes with meticulous drawings and photos of neurons. Their discoveries are amazing, but from just a few scattered trees, can we hope to comprehend the totality of the forest?
In the seventeenth century, the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote about the vastness of the universe:
Let man contemplate Nature entire in her full and lofty majesty; let him put far from his sight the
lowly objects that surround him; let him regard that blazing light, placed like an eternal lamp to
illuminate the world; let the earth appear to him but a point within the vast circuit which that star
describes; and let him marvel that this immense circumference is itself but a speck from the
viewpoint of the stars that move in the firmament.
Shocked and humbled by these thoughts, he confessed that he was terrified by “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.” Pascal meditated upon outer space, but we need only turn our thoughts inward to feel his dread. Inside every one of our skulls lies an organ so vast in its complexity that it might as well be infinite.
As a neuroscientist myself, I have come to know firsthand Pascal’s feeling of dread. I have also experienced embarrassment. Sometimes I speak to the public about the state of our field. After one such talk, I was pummeled with questions. What causes depression and schizophrenia? What is special about the brain of an Einstein or a Beethoven? How can my child learn to read better? As I failed to give satisfying answers, I could see faces fall. In my shame I finally apologized to the audience. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You thought I’m a professor because I know the answers. Actually I’m a professor because I know how much I don’t know.”
Studying an object as complex as the brain may seem almost futile. The brain’s billions of neurons resemble trees of many species and come in many fantastic shapes. Only the most determined explorers can hope to capture a glimpse of this forest’s interior, and even they see little, and see it poorly. It’s no wonder that the brain remains an enigma. My audience was curious about brains that malfunction or excel, but even the humdrum lacks explanation. Every day we recall the past, perceive the present, and imagine the future. How do our brains accomplish these feats? It’s safe to say that nobody really
knows.
Daunted by the brain’s complexity, many neuroscientists have chosen to study animals with drastically fewer neurons than humans. The worm shown in Figure 2 lacks what we’d call a brain. Its neurons are scattered throughout its body rather than centralized in a single organ. Together they form a nervous system containing a mere 300 neurons. That sounds manageable. I’ll wager that even Pascal, with his depressive tendencies, would not have dreaded the forest of C. elegans. (That’s the scientific name for the one-millimeter-long worm.)
Every neuron in this worm has been given a unique name and has a characteristic location and shape. Worms are like precision machines mass-produced in a factory: Each one has a nervous system built from the same set of parts, and the parts are always arranged in the same way.
What’s more, this standardized nervous system has been mapped completely. The result — see Figure 3 — is something like the flight maps we see in the back pages of airline magazines. The four-letter name of each neuron is like the three-letter code for each of the world’s airports. The lines represent connections between neurons, just as lines on a flight map represent routes between cities. We say that two neurons are “connected” if there is a small junction, called a synapse, at a point where the neurons touch. Through the synapse one neuron sends messages to the other.
Engineers know that a radio is constructed by wiring together electronic components like resistors, capacitors, and transistors. A nervous system is likewise an assembly of neurons, “wired” together by their slender branches. That’s why the map shown in Figure 3 was originally called a wiring diagram. More recently, a new term has been introduced — connectome. This word invokes not electrical engineering but the field of genomics. You have probably heard that DNA is a long molecule resembling a chain. The individual links of the chain are small molecules called nucleotides, denoted by the letters A, C, G, and T. Your genome is the entire sequence of nucleotides in your DNA, or equivalently a long string of letters drawn from this four-letter alphabet. Figure 4 shows an excerpt from the three billion letters, which would be a million pages long if printed as a
book.
In the same way, a connectome is the totality of connections between the neurons in a nervous system. The term, like genome, implies completeness. A connectome is not one connection, or even many. It is all of them. In principle, your brain can also be summarized by a diagram that is like the worm’s, though much more complex. Would your connectome reveal anything interesting about you?
The first thing it would reveal is that you are unique. You know this, of course, but it has been surprisingly difficult to pinpoint where, precisely, your uniqueness resides. Your connectome and mine are very different. They are not standardized like those of worms. That’s consistent with the idea that every human is unique in a way that a worm is not (no offense intended to worms!).
Differences fascinate us. When we ask how the brain works, what mostly interests us is why the brains of people work so differently. Why can’t I be more outgoing, like my extroverted friend? Why does my son find reading more difficult than his classmates do? Why is my teenage cousin starting to hear imaginary voices? Why is my mother losing her memory? Why can’t my spouse (or I) be more compassionate and understanding?
This book proposes a simple theory: Minds differ because connectomes differ. The theory is implicit in newspaper headlines like “Autistic Brains Are Wired Differently.” Personality and IQ might also be explained by connectomes. Perhaps even your memories, the most idiosyncratic aspect of your personal identity, could be encoded in your connectome.
Although this theory has been around a long time, neuroscientists still don’t know whether it’s true. But clearly the implications are enormous. If it’s true, then curing mental disorders is ultimately about repairing connectomes. In fact, any kind of personal change — educating yourself, drinking less, saving your marriage — is about changing your connectome.
But let’s consider an alternative theory: Minds differ because genomes differ. In effect, we are who we are because of our genes. The new age of the personal genome is dawning. Soon we will be able to find our own DNA sequences quickly and cheaply. We know that genes play a role in mental disorders and contribute to normal variation in personality and IQ. Why study connectomes if genomics is already so powerful?
The reason is simple: Genes alone cannot explain how your brain got to be the way it is. As you lay nestled in your mother’s womb, you already possessed your genome but not yet the memory of your first kiss. Your memories were acquired during your lifetime, not before. Some of you can play the piano; some can ride a bicycle. These are learned abilities rather than instincts programmed by the genes.
Unlike your genome, which is fixed from the moment of conception, your connectome changes throughout life. Neuroscientists have already identified the basic kinds of change. Neurons adjust, or “reweight,” their connections by strengthening or weakening them. Neurons reconnect by creating and eliminating synapses, and they rewire by growing and retracting branches. Finally, entirely new neurons are created and eliminated, through regeneration.
We don’t know exactly how life events — your parents’ divorce, your fabulous year abroad — change your connectome. But there is good evidence that all four R’s — reweighting, reconnection, rewiring, and regeneration — are affected by your experiences. At the same time, the four R’s are also guided by genes. Minds are indeed influenced by genes, especially when the brain is “wiring” itself up during infancy and childhood.
Both genes and experiences have shaped your connectome. We must consider both historical influences if we want to explain how your brain got to be the way it is. The connectome theory of mental differences is compatible with the genetic theory, but it is far richer and more complex because it includes the effects of living in the world. The connectome theory is also less deterministic. There is reason to believe that we shape our own connectomes by the actions we take, even by the things we think. Brain wiring may make us who we are, but we play an important role in wiring up our brains.
To restate the theory more simply:
You are more than your genes. You are your connectome.
Product details
- ASIN : 0547508182
- Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition (February 7, 2012)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780547508184
- ISBN-13 : 978-0547508184
- Item Weight : 1.25 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.25 x 1 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #796,606 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #637 in Medical Neuropsychology
- #657 in Neuroscience (Books)
- #1,072 in Popular Neuropsychology
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author

Sebastian Seung is Professor of Computational Neuroscience and Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Harvard University, and formerly worked at Bell Laboratories. His research on artificial intelligence and neuroscience has been published in leading scientific journals, and also featured in the New York Times, Technology Review, and the Economist. His laboratory at MIT is currently inventing technologies for mapping connections between the brain's neurons, and investigating the hypothesis that we are all unique because we are "wired differently."
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I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, finding Seung's diverse background in both computing and neuroscience very interesting in his approach to studying the brain. While the book does go into areas "beyond humanity" and some heavy philosophical and religious ideas that I felt did not belong in this kind of book, I found the different take on the study of connectivity very interesting and informative.
The book is divided into 5 parts that break down where we have come from, where we currently are, and where we should go in analyzing the structure of our brains connections.
"Does Size Matter"
In the first section of the book, Seung explains much of the major scientific advances in neuroscience that have brought us to where we are today. He does a great job by explaining previous beliefs about the brain and how, through advances in imaging technology and several famous case studies, we have found that most of our initial thoughts were far from accurate. The field of neuroscience has spent years trying to determine what differences in size and shape of our brains has meant and how these differences shape who we are. Seung also starts to emphasize the importance at looking at the brain at a finer scale to find out exactly how the brain is organized.
"Connectionism"
The second part of the book is dedicated to providing background on the neurons of the brain. Being one of the most important and fundamental elements in neuroscience, the author goes into great detail and uses many easily understood representations to describe the how the neuron functions in itself and also how neurons interact with one another. Memories are one of the most important examples of how neurons can change and create new connections with one another in order to "save" information. Seung discusses that much of what we know about memories involves groups of neurons and regions of the brain and in order to better understand what makes a memory at the neuron level, better technology must be available.
"Nature and Nurture"
One major area of study is how our genome (entire collection of our genes) and our connectome (entire connections of our neurons) are related. Many agree that both are very important in determining who we are and become. While our genes may initially determine how our brains develop, Seung explains that the connections that are formed thereafter depend on our experiences and attempts to shed some light on how that may occur. Seung also introduces the four types of connectome change - reweighting, reconnection, rewiring, and regeneration ("The four R's") and their importance in improving normal brains and helping to heal diseased or injured brains.
"Connectomics"
The largest part of the book focuses on the new science of connectomics and the advanced technologies being invented for finding connectomes. Seung already emphasized the importance of looking at the connections of neurons themselves to fully understand how the brain is wired, so most of this section brings up the flaws of current techniques that are unable to provide the resolution and clarity that he claims is essential in connectomics. While current methods of dividing the brain rely mostly on functional divisions, Sueng argues that we must return to dividing the brain based on structural differences that would be apparent given greater imaging technologies and methods. Finally, the author adds that knowledge of the molecules involved in the four R's of connectome would be essential to creating treatments to change the connections of the brain to treat brain disorders and diseases.
"Beyond Humanity"
In the last section of the book, Seung goes beyond the study of the connectome into a much more philisphical realm of life and death and what it means to be human. Proposing ideas such as scanning someone's brain to create a personal computer simulation and preserving peoples brains for future resurrection, the author goes back and forth between topics of science and religion. While some points he makes are grounded with some scientific basis, he goes above and beyond in ideas that many would consider unethical. The transition from looking at the connectome as a way research and treat diseases to a way to address the meaning of life seemed out of place and irrelevant to an otherwise very interesting book on the brain.
This book is written for those with a new found interest in neuroscience and the experienced experts alike and uses simplistic and relevant representations to help get across the most detailed of concepts. The use of stories and personal experiences of the author also make the book very interesting in the midst of some very dense topics and ideas. The structure of the book also makes for a relatively quick read as Seung divides each of the five parts into several chapters that each cover a few main ideas. He also includes a section of footnotes at the end of the book that can be referenced for further insight and specifics of much of the research mentioned.
Overall, I thought this book was very interesting and is a great read for anyone with a significant interest in neuroscience. Because much of the book consists of the author's personal opinions and ideas, the information in the book should be taken as such and used more as a foundation for ones own ideas and not a scientific reference. A lot of what the author suggests in the book as far as directions of study are very futuristic and dependent on technology that currently doesn't exist. Since much of the advice and ideas are hypothetical, it is difficult to find relevance to current research in the field and Seung is much better at explaining how much we actually do not know regarding the connections in the brain. I thought the final section of the book was very irrelevant to the books purpose of explaining the connectome and does more harm than good in bringing up controversial religions and ethical topics and ideas.
In discussing the wiring of the brain, Sebastian Seung claims that "connectomes are like vast books written in letters that we barely see, in a language that we do not yet comprehend." This book does an excellent job in explaining where we have come from and presents some ideas on where we should go, but the way we are going to get there is very unclear.
If you are looking for a book that explains the basic foundation of connections in the brain and don't mind sifting through some very abstract ideas, than I highly suggest this fun and interesting read.
I approach this topic from the perspective of wanting to know how the brain is able to store a seemingly infinite amount of information. We seem to be able to store and recall every sensation of our lives. Our ability to learn seems to be unlimited. Scientists are able to use their brains to discern the nature of the entire universe from its smallest subatomic particle to its largest megastructures.
Then comes the speculative part: if we learn how the human brain stores and processes information so as to create consciousness what will we be able to do next? Will we be able to synthesize higher intelligences? Will we learn to immortalize our beings by uploading our brains to undying machines? How about uploading our consciousness to a thousand machines, creating a thousand replicas of ourselves? Will we be able to do the "Vulcan mind meld" of integrating our conscious minds with those of other people and machine intelligences? Providing speculative answers to these kinds of questions are found at the end of the book.
But first we have to learn how the human brain does its thing. Here is what I took away from the book:
* The brain's "connectome" is extremely dense. Those hundred billion neurons in our brains are like miniature redwood trees. Each one makes thousands of connections with other neurons. Some neurons span the entire brain, making connections with every part of it.
* The connections themselves are variable. Some are strong and some are weak. Some are influenced by connections with OTHER neutrons. The process is dynamic. As experiences enter our consciousness some connections are strengthened while others are weakened or dropped.
* The complexity of the brain is unfathomable --- a hundred billion neurons; seven thousand connections per neuron; variable strength in the connections; and connections that may be activated by OTHER connections of other neurons in other parts of the brain.
* The brain constantly regenerates by creating new connections between neurons and by destroying connections that are not used. Destruction is necessary to prevent memories of lesser importance from "drowning out" memories of higher importance.
* We've learned some of methods by which the neural networks in our brains parse incoming data. Studies reveal that there is a specific neuron in each test subject's brain that recognizes a picture of Jenifer Aniston. Another specific neuron recognizes Tom Cruise. It seems that these particular neurons sit at the apex of networks that parse images of people. When the right combination of characteristics filter up from lower levels in the net, either the "Jenifer Aniston" or "Tom Cruise" neuron is triggered to recognize that particular combination of characteristics.
* This book is also delightful for what it DOESN'T talk about. I decided right off the bat that it would be worth at least three stars when I searched for "free will" and found no instances of that annoying topic.
After describing the current state of knowledge about the connectome, Seung addresses the speculative questions of whether we can amplify or copy human intelligence and consciousness. As a practical matter, immortalization of consciousness means "Is it worthwhile to pay somebody $25,000 to freeze my head when I die?" Here again there are questions to be asked.
The primary question is "Completeness" --- how complete does the restoration of the connectome have to be in order to bring a deceased brain back to conscious life? Is consciousness wholly defined by the neural connections or might it be defined lower down by the "ion channels" and perhaps even the quantum states of atoms within the neurons? Might each neuron be infinitely diverse and therefore impossible to duplicate by artificial means?
At this point it would be amusing to mention all the science fiction stories about people being revived by cryonics hundreds of years in the future, like the poor fellow whose frozen brain was revived in the 25th century only to be sold to a bootleg electronics contractor who installed it as a thermostat in a space station. These sorts of speculations have been staples of scifi for my entire life. But now it does seem that we have at least learned to ask the right QUESTIONS about how to use our knowledge of the connectome to amplify or immortalize our intelligence in limited ways.
We also seem to have learned how to mimic the brain's neural networks in more mundane applications. For example, the knowledge of how the connectome processes an image in order to trigger the "Jen Aniston" or "Tom Cruise" neuron would have obvious implications for computerized pattern recognition. It also raises the prospect of mind-reading. If the same neurons fire the same way in everybody's brains, then we would be able to tell who is thinking about "Jen Aniston" or "Tom Crusise" or eventually anything else by examining the firing of particular neurons. Perhaps a person's memories can be scanned out of their brains by examining the patterns of their neurons firing.
This book succeeds on two counts:
1. It provides a solid grounding into the anatomy of the brain at its intermediate level of neural networks.
2. It sounds an early warning into the scientific and ethical issues that future brain, mind, and cybernetic researches are likely to open up. The ethical issues of stem cell research will seem like small controversies compared to the question of whether we should be cloning our minds into machine intelligence.
The book is most enjoyable for a layperson. I felt that some of the details were over-described, but then Seung is also writing for a professional audience. It was only an occasional page or two of detail that I really felt compelled to skim past. I came away feeling that I am up to speed on the current state of brain/mind/consciousness research.








