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The trick is finding ways to keep brain connections in good condition and to grow more of them.

Educators say that, for adults, one way to nudge neurons in the right direction is to challenge the very assumptions they have worked so hard to accumulate while young. With a brain already full of well-connected pathways, adult learners should “jiggle their synapses a bit” by confronting thoughts that are contrary to their own, says Dr. Taylor, who is 66.

Teaching new facts should not be the focus of adult education, she says. Instead, continued brain development and a richer form of learning may require that you “bump up against people and ideas” that are different. In a history class, that might mean reading multiple viewpoints, and then prying open brain networks by reflecting on how what was learned has changed your view of the world.

Such stretching is exactly what scientists say best keeps a brain in tune: get out of the comfort zone to push and nourish your brain. Do anything from learning a foreign language to taking a different route to work.

“As adults we have these well-trodden paths in our synapses,” Dr. Taylor says. “We have to crack the cognitive egg and scramble it up. And if you learn something this way, when you think of it again you’ll have an overlay of complexity you didn’t have before — and help your brain keep developing as well.”

suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. The brain evolved increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few select signals at the expense of others,

The next evolutionary advance was a centralized controller for attention that could coordinate among all senses. In many animals, that central controller is a brain area called the tectum

It coordinates something called overt attention

The tectum is a beautiful piece of engineering. To control the head and the eyes efficiently, it constructs something called an internal model, a feature well known to engineers. An internal model is a simulation that keeps track of whatever is being controlled and allows for predictions and planning.

With the evolution of reptiles around 350 to 300 million years ago, a new brain structure began to emerge – the wulst

our version is usually called the cerebral cortex and has expanded enormously

The cortex is like an upgraded tectum

The most important difference between the cortex and the tectum may be the kind of attention they control

tectum is the master of overt attention—pointing the sensory apparatus toward anything important

cortex ups the ante with something called covert attention

Your cortex can shift covert attention from the text in front of you to a nearby person, to the sounds in your backyard, to a thought or a memory. Covert attention is the virtual movement of deep processing from one item to another.

the cortex must model something much more abstract.

it does so by constructing an attention schema

a constantly updated set of information that describes what covert attention is doing moment-by-moment and what its consequences are

The attention schema is therefore strategically vague. It depicts covert attention in a physically incoherent way, as a non-physical essence. And this, according to the theory, is the origin of consciousness. We say we have consciousness because deep in the brain, something quite primitive is computing that semi-magical self-description.

In the AST, the attention schema first evolved as a model of one’s own covert attention. But once the basic mechanism was in place, according to the theory, it was further adapted to model the attentional states of others, to allow for social prediction

theory of mind, the ability to understand the possible contents of someone else’s mind.

Language is perhaps the most recent big leap in the evolution of consciousness. Nobody knows when human language first evolved. Certainly we had it by 70 thousand years ago when people began to disperse around the world, since all dispersed groups have a sophisticated language.

Maybe partly because of language and culture, humans have a hair-trigger tendency to attribute consciousness to everything around us.

Justin Barrett called it the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device, or HADD

hear colors, taste shapes, or experience other curious sensory modality crossings, allegedly related to abnormal functioning of the hippocampus, one of the limbic structures in the brain. It has also been suggested that synesthesia constitutes a form of "supernormal integration" involving the posterior parietal cortex. The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin and Russian-born painter Wassily Kandinsky both pioneered artistic links between sight and sound, while they may have been synesthetes themselves. Russian mnemonist Solomon Shereshevskii, studied for decades by neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, appears to have used his natural synesthesia to memorize amazing amounts of data.

in seeing with your ears when using a device that maps images into sounds, or in hearing with your eyes when using a device that maps sounds into images.

In case of "explicit" synesthesia, the sounds would induce conscious sensations (qualia) of light and visual patterns.