Better brain research (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, July 03, 2015, 15:29 (3409 days ago) @ David Turell

We can never fully decode the brain's activities as it relates to human behaviour. This article discusses the brain as a biological computer, which has been my view all along. But as a biological instrument, it has biological attributes, such as time delay, which does not imply we do not control it:-http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/opinion/sunday/face-it-your-brain-is-a-computer.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&_r=0-"Although my colleagues and I don't literally think that the brain is a field programmable gate array, our suggestion is that the brain might similarly consist of highly orchestrated sets of fundamental building blocks, such as “computational primitives” for constructing sequences, retrieving information from memory, and routing information between different locations in the brain. Identifying those building blocks, we believe, could be the Rosetta stone that unlocks the brain.-"To put this differently, it is unlikely that we will ever be able to directly connect the language of neurons and synapses to the diversity of human behavior, as many neuroscientists seem to hope. The chasm between brains and behavior is just too vast.-*****-"There is much that we don't know about brains. But we do know that they aren't magical. They are just exceptionally complex arrangements of matter. Airplanes may not fly like birds, but they are subject to the same forces of lift and drag. Likewise, there is no reason to think that brains are exempt from the laws of computation. If the heart is a biological pump, and the nose is a biological filter, the brain is a biological computer, a machine for processing information in lawful, systematic ways.-"The sooner we can figure out what kind of computer the brain is, the better."