The Portuguese neuroscientist working in the USA Antonio Damasio has recently visited Portugal. An opportunity to listen once more to the most reputed scientist working in the field of brain functioning.

Neurosciences have evolved dramatically in the last 50 years. The introduction of new imagery technology allowed us to look inside the brain, get to know its structures and some of its secrets. Today, we understand that different structures have different functions and all of them are integrated in a network continuously cooperating. Additionally, we also know that our reasoning, our tridimensional vision of the world, our memory, our language and curiously also our emotions, all lie around brain function.

There was never any other time in History when human knowledge went so beyond the responses to human fundamental questions: “why and how do we feel?”

This half of a century showed to us two brain functions that are pivotal to understand it as a whole.

The first one is its complexity. We have an average of 100 billion (UK notation) neurons and each one connects to more than 4000 other neurons: this results in an incredible number of information transfers between cells. And even if we can today link specific functions to a specific brain region, we also know that they don’t work alone but instead there are also immense connections between different regions, thus potentiating a complex but harmonious functioning.

The second crucial character of the brain tissue is its plasticity. We all know that individuals with brain damage corresponding to a change in function, can resume that same function along the time: this is the principle of physiotherapy; it’s possible to train the brain towards the recovery of lost capacities. And this is what normal learning is about: the ability to give shape to the brain functioning in face of the stimuli it receives. At each moment of our lives the cellular and molecular functioning of the brain can modify according to what we see, feel, experience and think....

It is precisely this plasticity, which is considered today as indisputable in the framework of brain studies, that allows us to forecast who we are and how we are. We are what we live, what we feel during our lives, our experiences, our frustrations and successes. Of course there’s a genetic heritage, an indisputable heritage. But current neuroscience has put side by side with social constructivists, by demonstrating that beyond that inherited biology, there’s a brain intrinsic capacity to establish new connections between neurons, and redefine and adapt to new stimuli and new realities.

Once more, science wins over the common sense and the “clichés” about “human nature”. We are not “natural” individualists. We are not “natural” selfish and ambitious people. We are not naturally weaker or stronger. We are not more or less conformists or mavericks by nature.

We are what we learn to be. We are what the brain sees, learns and lives. We are more or less homogeneous products, more or less faithful to what we feel and what we build, from the first until the last day of our life. And modern science is there to show it.

We are individuals as well as societies, creators of ourselves. Social change will always be possible as far as there is the human will, without atavisms from the so called “human nature”.

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