How We Learn - Stanislas Dehaene  ## Metadata - Author: **Stanislas Dehaene** - Full Title: How We Learn - Category: #books ## Highlights - will also introduce you to Nico, a young painter who, while visiting the Marmottan Museum in Paris, managed to make an excellent copy of Monet’s famous painting *Impression, Sunrise* (see [figure 1](private://read/01jtsc4zs5422kz9byezbd49t2/#None) in the color insert). What is so exceptional about this? Nothing, besides the fact that he accomplished it with only a single hemisphere, his left one—the right half of his brain was almost fully removed at the age of three! Nico’s brain learned to squeeze all his talents into half a brain: speech, writing, and reading, as usual, but drawing and painting too, which are generally thought to be functions of the right hemisphere, and also computer science and even wheelchair fencing, a sport in which he has reached the rank of champion in Spain. Forget everything you were told about the respective roles of both hemispheres, because Nico’s life proves that anyone can become a creative and talented artist without a right hemisphere! Cerebral plasticity seems to work miracles. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jv6d0pc08kycdtt3xa33w862)) - At its core, intelligence can be viewed as a process that converts unstructured information into useful and actionable knowledge. Demis Hassabis, founder of the AI company DeepMind (2017) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jv6d7p131sa5e24wdb3v9jqy)) - You may not be aware of it, but your brain has acquired thousands of internal models of the outside world. Metaphorically speaking, they are like miniature mock-ups more or less faithful to the reality they represent. We all have in our brains, for example, a mental map of our neighborhood and our home—all we have to do is close our eyes and envision them with our thoughts. Obviously, none of us were born with this mental map—we had to acquire it through learning. The richness of these mental models, which are, for the most part, unconscious, exceeds our imagination. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jv6devd7541pgyxw70bm5vx0))