Tuesday, 26 September 2017
The Brain: The History of an Organ Like No Other
In the spring of 2017, I had to give a one-hour basic lecture about the human brain as part of a a free course for the general public at UPop Montréal. With so many different possibilities, deciding what approach to take in my lecture was no small challenge. In the end, I decided to start by trying to explain what the brain is not and dispelling a number of frequent misconceptions.
Most of the metaphors that compare the brain with a computer are pretty misleading, so I began by taking them apart, and then replacing them with others that better account for the selective, self-organizing dynamic processes that take place in the human brain and make the subtlest mental states possible. Thus, instead of comparing the brain to a computer, I used metaphors such as strange attractors in chaos physics and the complex flow patterns in a mountain stream—metaphors that can embrace both the long evolutionary history of the human brain, which accounts for its overall structure, and the neural networks that develop in an individual’s brain through a process of selection over that person’s lifetime. (more…)
From the Simple to the Complex | Comments Closed
