Memory. Very basic stuff. A bit of a letdown, it's this basic. He goes over some of the big new experiments, but we don’t learn much about what memory is or how it works. The chapter itself is about Darwin and other thinkers and how we started to search for similarities in animal brains. Brain centers are mentioned, but many deny them. Darwin’s theory is not used to research brain modules until much later. I assume he implies evolutionary psychology that appeared in the 1980's. It’s quite a slump for sure. Galloping through centuries of wild speculation and ingenious, sometimes macabre anatomical investigations, scientist and historian Matthew Cobb reveals how we came to our present state of knowledge. Our latest theories allow us to create artificial memories in the brain of a mouse, and to build AI programmes capable of extraordinary cognitive feats. A complete understanding seems within our grasp.

Ostensibly, this book is about how the metaphors we’ve used to understand the brain over time have been informed by the technologies of the time, and in turn, these metaphors actually constrain our understanding. That concept makes a couple of cameos in the book, but is by no means an organizing principle. How computer AI works. Very short intro. There are some points about how AI researchers see the brain, but brains are totally different from programs. Also, we don't know how AI works so the research i even though we may not currently understand a particular phenomenon, that does not mean we will never be able to understand it. To argue that there are things we can never understand is to undermine the whole point of science, which is to explain what is currently unexplainable." The idea of stimulating the brain to evoke conscious experiences has a long history in neuroscience [ 1– 4]. Nowadays, brain–machine interfaces [ 5] encode and decode neuronal activity [ 6– 8] and are routinely used to control neuroprosthetics [ 9]. Electrical stimulation of sensory brain areas is becoming sufficiently precise to deliver specific content, bypassing sensory organs [ 10] or diseased brain tissue [ 11]. Furthermore, it is now possible to evoke a memory by selectively reactivating ensembles of neurons (i.e., the engram) that were naturally active in the animal’s brain in a previous event [ 12, 13] (for review, see [ 14]). Although brain activity can take many forms, it is almost always associated with the neuronal firing of action potentials. Moreover, the effective use of action potentials in brain–machine interfaces with neuroprosthetics and rehabilitation of neural function [ 5] suggests that action potentials are the fundamental unit of information in the brain. Cobb’s greater lesson is straightforward, but difficult: we should spend more time trying to understand the brain as it is, and as it functions in a comparative context, rather than through the lens of whatever metaphor or analogy happens to be handy or fashionable. His last paragraph is instructive, for it offers a series of scenarios based on connectomes, semiotics, semantics, cybernetics, control theory and so on. Each sentence begins with the word “Or”, although the last one is just followed by a dash, creating a blank screen like the final episode of The Sopranos, on to which we can write anything we please, or hope, or fear, or understand. As of now, we understand so little of the entity that allows us to understand.

Gerade das Kapitel mit Bewusstsein fand ich besonders gut weil er deutlich hervorbringt, dass NIEMAND Ahnung darüber hat, wie es funktioniert und wo es im Gehirn verankert ist. Und überhaupt ob es wichtig ist, dass wir das wissen müssen. Und ob es nicht besser ist diese Debatte wichtigerer Themen gegenüber zu opfern.

In the latter part of the 19th century, evolution came into the picture. The argument was that differences in mental capacities between species were a matter of degree, not kind, which was best explained by common ancestry. Spiritualism also became popular, however, so that even some highly influential evolutionary biologists thought that at least some mental phenomena, such as consciousness, transcended the body, so that evolution was not a significant factor. main job is to process information. But some experts argue that because brains are biological — they evolved within the vagaries of a body — they operate in ways that a machine doesn’t ( SN: 8/23/16). Another key problem facing the scientific community in trying to understand the brain is that there is no viable theoretical framework in which they can frame their problems. The approach currently is just to collect a deluge of big data which some neuroscientists are very dismissive of because there is no overarching goal or hypothesis in which to guide this collection of experimental data. One major crux of this issue is whether the mind is material and thus the provenance/origin of consciousness. Like most debates within this space materialism is often taken as an implicit assumption and thereby slanting the debate. The author also makes the erroneous statement that no empirical evidence collected so far gives us a non-material explanation. Well duh that's the whole point of it being immaterial and so one needs a framework which can take into this account but obviously that is not possible in the current prevailing paradigm. We are getting into the actual science and not just loose philosophy. Now people are looking into animal brains and even studying people who have brain injuries in certain parts of the brain. Which makes scientists like Broca find brain areas responsible for certain instincts like the language center.

The ancients believed the heart was the anatomical seat of thought and consciousness and considered the brain to be of relative little import. Neurons are information messengers which use electrical and chemical impulses to transmit information around the central nervous system (CNS). In experiments routinely performed in neurobiological laboratories, action potentials are recorded and evoked in single neurons and even in small-scale networks [ 15, 16] using current clamp and voltage clamp techniques. Using these techniques, triggering action potentials at the researcher’s bidding (rather than naturally due to the synaptic inputs) is commonplace and even mundane in a modern electrophysiological laboratory. The rapid development of tools and technologies in neuroscience [ 17– 21] brings the goal of capturing every action potential in every neuron of the brain ever closer [ 22, 23]. To date, the highest number of channels recorded by an electrode array belongs to the Argo system, with 65,536 channels [ 24]. These technologies provide unprecedented insights into the fine details of brain function. Thus, it is perhaps just a matter of time until newer, more powerful technologies will eventually allow us to solve the mechanics of how the brain works. As we converge on this goal, will we get closer to understanding brain function and, with it, the biological causes of conscious experience?

Sha, Z., et al. (2021). Handedness and its genetic influences are associated with structural asymmetries of the cerebral cortex in 31,864 individuals. Paradigmatic metaphor (the idea of the brain) has played an enormous role in guiding our thinking and inquiry. We may not answer very basic questions regarding brain function until a new organizing principal emerges. It is history, but it’s modern “we don’t know” science history. It’s about brain connections and how we actually still don’t know anything about them.

The left and right sides of the brain connect via nerve fibers. In a healthy brain, the two sides communicate with one another.

A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking. The experiment we described here is useful as a benchmark for theories of consciousness, revealing hidden incoherences and ambiguities [ 58]. Specifically, for a given theory of consciousness, we ask in which step (i.e., Steps 1 to 3) and why we would reject the working hypothesis and claim that the participant loses consciousness.Baxter MG, Croxson PL. Facing the role of the amygdala in emotional information processing. Proc Nat Acad Sci. 2012;109(52):21180-21181. doi:10.1073/pnas.1219167110 In the ancient western world the seat of emotion, perception, consciousness, and thought was the heart, not the brain. If you think of it, with whatever organ you choose, this makes sense. The brain just sits there. But the heart is always moving. You can’t ignore the heart. But you can’t feel the brain at all.