Understanding the brain

People find it difficult to get into their heads what goes on in their heads: how billions of nerve cells, working in parallel on individual tasks in separate areas of the brain with no coordinating supervision, are nevertheless able to assemble sensual input into coherent perceptions of the world, create decisions and come up with new ideas. How can our intuition fail so fundamentally when it comes to studying the organ to which it owes its existence—that is, when it comes to understanding how the brain works? We imagine that there is a central entity at work in our heads, which we equate with our conscious self and that has all the wonderful abilities that distinguish us as humans. This intuition imposes itself so persuasively—even overwhelmingly—that it is not surprising that, throughout our cultural history, scientists and philosophers have speculated as to where in the brain this all‐powerful and all‐controlling entity might be.![][1] The plausible assumption was that there must be a single location where all information about our internal conditions and environment is made available, decisions are taken and actions are initiated. Even Descartes—who considered mental processes to be superior to, rather than connected to, material processes in the brain, and whose free‐floating res cogitans would therefore have needed no circumscribed location—did not believe that it was possible to get by without a singular localizable controlling entity.The contradiction between this assumption and the scientific evidence that has arisen since the time of Descartes could hardly be greater. Studies of the structural and functional organization of the brain have shown that this organ is, to a large extent, decentralized, and processes information in parallel in countless sensory and motor subsystems. In short, there is no single homunculus in our brains that controls and manages all these distributed processes.This … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif