How on earth does lifeless matter become the building blocks for living things? How do neurons turn into minds? What should be the vocabulary used to… - Michael S. Gazzaniga

Our brains renew themselves throughout life to an extent previously thought not possible.

When shown a series of photographs of five natural landscapes — tropical rain forest, temperate deciduous forest, coniferous forest, savanna, and desert — the youngest subjects (those in the third and fifth grades) picked the savanna as a preferred landscape. Older subjects equally preferred those landscapes with which they were familiar, as well as the savanna.52 People were happier viewing scenes with trees rather than inanimate objects, and also preferred the shapes of trees with spreading canopies, similar to those found on the African savanna, rather than rounded or columnar ones.

The fact is, life’s successes and failures are sporadic, and their causes are difficult to determine. Hard work and luck are behind most successes, though it is hard to say, for any given success, how much of each there has been.