How spontaneous brain activity keeps you alive - Nathan S. Jacobs
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TEDEd Animation
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The wheels in your brain are constantly turning, even when you're asleep or not paying attention. In fact, most of your brain’s activities are ones you’d never be aware of … unless they suddenly stopped. Nathan S. Jacobs takes us inside the always active, surprisingly spontaneous brain.
An odd feature of the human sensory systems is that they often have to create or interpret the sensory signals picked up by our eyes, ears, and other sensory organs. For example, our visual system spontaneously “fills in” the two gaping holes in our visual field created by the optic nerve punching through the retina to make it’s way to the brain. Do you think that our memory systems also spontaneously fill in missing information? Have you ever remembered being somewhere with someone, but later realized you were totally wrong and you were actually with someone else? If this has happened to you, why do you think your brain spontaneously filled in this information? Why not just leave that part of the memory blank?
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Meet The Creators
- Educator Nathan S. Jacobs
- Director Hector Herrera
- Producer Pazit Cahlon
- Script Editor Alex Gendler
- Narrator Addison Anderson
