Ten years ago, if someone had asked me what I thought would be the focus of my life in the upcoming years, the last thing I would have said was that I would write a book about the brain.
I am not a neuroscientist, but I have always been interested in science. I am originally an electrical engineer, and I worked in this field for over twenty-five years, and I have even founded a company. Then came a tremendous change: I switched to publishing, setting up a small publishing house, Ursus Libris, which publishes books mainly on psychology and religions, often at the interface between the two. Eastern religions and neuroscience, spirituality, and psychology – the more I delved into these subjects, the more similarities I discovered between the way these approaches think about human beings, about what is good and meaningful in life, and about ways to happiness. My notions have been supported by the integral vision of Ken Wilber, a comprehensive, practical and philosophical system of the development of human consciousness, drawing on the scientific findings of modern psychology and ancient spiritual traditions. In the early 2010s, I started to include works on neurology in the repertoire of my publishing house. Iin addition, neurological and neuropsychological perspectives also appeared in the psychology and mindfulness books published by Ursus Libris, which caught my interest. In the process, I met experts who also guided me as to which areas I should seek further information on if I wanted to learn more about the brain. I became increasingly immersed in scientific findings, reading about discoveries and watching or listening to lectures that have revealed interesting details about how the nervous system works.
When I first read, for example, that the brain was plastic, that is, malleable, and that this plasticity remains even in old age, I almost exclaimed, “Eureka! Nothing is lost!” Ok, maybe that is an exaggeration, but I still got the impression that the possibility to shape the brain throughout life is one of humanity’s greatest treasures.
The more neurological and neuropsychological works I read, the more knowledge I absorbed, and the more I felt a sense of lack. It was like sitting over the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and not seeing how they fit together: not seeing how the gigantic neural network we call the brain works fundamentally according to the current state of research. I started looking for a book that would give such a comprehensive picture, and I found some thousand-page, high-quality works written specifically for professionals. But I could not find any that did a decent job of putting this knowledge into the public domain, i.e., in a way that was accessible to the ordinary person. There were no popular science books of average length that I liked. So, I decided to try to write a book about the brain myself because I was so passionate about reading and researching it. I did not think at the time that it would take five years to do this, even after laying the foundations. Neuroverse is the result of this process.
As I progressed in writing the book, and the big puzzle of the brain began to come together for me, the picture began to change, to look rather different from what I had previously thought. I found many missing elements that needed to be filled in, and many things connected differently than I had originally thought. For example, it was new to me what can change in the brain and what cannot, and how plasticity comes to being. By the end of the process, not only the functioning of the brain but human characteristics explainable by it have become more obvious to me, but also how we can put these traits to our advantage, in a way that serves not only the individual but also the harmonious existence of communities.
If you are keen to learn more about the brain – this wonderful organ that is in fact a very important biological and psychological foundation of human life – but often feel lost in the many scientific articles and cannot put the whole picture together, then you are in the right place. Believe me, it is not your fault that the puzzle has not been put together yet, nor is it the fault of science because the brain is so complex and so diverse that it takes a lot of time to understand it! Neuroverse only covers part of the field as well, although I feel it is complete.
The topics of the chapters, the subchapters, and the diagrams are all pieces of the puzzle of the brain. Neuroverse is designed to be helpful here, but you cannot skip your part of the task, the processing of information, the understanding of the connections, and, in short, the learning.