The brain is a complex organ that controls all bodily processes, including thought, sensory perception, and physical action. Despite weighing only 3 pounds, the human brain contains as many as 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections. Wagner MJ, Kim TH, Savall J, Schnitzer MJ, Luo L. Cerebellar granule cells encode the expectation of reward. Nature. 2017;544(7648):96-100. doi:10.1038/nature21726

Evolutionarily theory provided an organizing principal, and essentially transformed biology into a hard science. This is the story of our quest to understand the most mysterious object in the universe: the human brain. If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire. I’m not sure I fully followed his ideas. It’s a lot of historical figures with various theories. Largely they said the heart was the cognition. But in the 1500th century the brain is the cognition idea started to become the main one. It’s not clear when what happened. But the heart theory is fascinating as you can clearly see people are thinking with their brain when someone gets a brain injury. All very weird. He doesn’t explain with clear logic why the brain was not considered the main thinking part from the start. He gets into it, but it’s not really convincing. https://www.ninds.nih.gov/health-information/patient-caregiver-education/brain-basics-know-your-brainCobb dates a change in attitude to the late Middle Ages, and to the investigatory willingness of certain Italian academics. One important figure was Mondino de Luzzi, professor of medicine and anatomy at the University of Bologna. Writing of the preparations for a human dissection, Mondino stated simply that “the human corpse, killed through decapitation or hanging, is placed in the supine position” – words conveying an utter indifference to the dignity of the body in death which we assume today. A later Italian, Andreas Vesalius, enjoined his students to attend autopsies, observe and have less faith in anatomy textbooks. He was to produce anatomical drawings of the utmost precision and beauty – ones that have stood the test of time. More radical, however, than his accurate renderings of precise dissections, was the conclusion Vesalius drew from his dissections of the brains of the sheep, goat, cow, monkey, dog and birds: that “there is no difference at all in the structure of the brain” of these animals compared to the human brain – an early dethroning of human specialness, which Darwin would go on to complete. Brain a machine. This philosophy is now boring. It’s not the cool creative philosophy of the past. Rather people are trying to actually explain how the brain works. So it’s largely statements like: the brain is like a computer, the brain calculates things, the brain reacts but can also be made to not react.

If the reader answers “yes” in Step 3, then a second resection or any number of additional resections should not change the reader’s answer. Iteratively resecting and re-resecting eventually leaves us with a brain in the form of geographically scattered individual neurons. Therefore, accepting the hypothesis in Step 3 results in a conscious scattered brain. The alternative, namely, arguing that scattered brains cannot be conscious, leads to rejecting the hypothesis that the firing of the neurons causes our conscious experience. looking ahead to what the future might hold. The possibilities include the creation of conscious machines, or even having to Macdonald K, Germine L, Anderson A, Christodoulou J, Mcgrath LM. Dispelling the Myth: Training in Education or Neuroscience Decreases but Does Not Eliminate Beliefs in Neuromyths. Front Psychol. 2017;8:1314. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01314 It seems that we need a Newton, Darwin or Einstein to come into brain and cognition research. We need new ideas and new metaphors. We probably need more advanced technology.

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. A powerful examination of what we think we know about the brain and why -- despite technological advances -- the workings of our most essential organ remain a mystery. An "elegant", "engrossing" (Carol Tavris, Wall Street Journal) examination of what we think we know about the brain and why -- despite technological advances -- the workings of our most essential organ remain a mystery. Klimova, B., et al. (2020). The effect of healthy diet on cognitive performance among healthy seniors – A mini review. Integrated information theory [ 84– 86] quantifies consciousness based on the repertoire of all possible cause-and-effect interactions between the neurons in the brain’s network. Disconnecting the neurons in Step 2 abolished the network structure that underlies the interaction between neurons. However, in Step 1, the replay imposed particular (recorded) trains of action potentials and effectively vetoed all the interaction between the neurons, even though the synaptic connections were fully functional. Therefore, according to the assumptions of IIT, our participant already loses consciousness in Step 1.