Making A Brain Map That We Can Use [NPR.org]

It is now conventional wisdom that the brain is the seat of the mind; it is alone through the brain's workings that we think and feel and know.

But what is a brain, anyway?

My thoughts turned to this question reading a recent New York Times piece about Sebastian Seung's project to map the brain by tracing out each of the trillions of links between individual neurons. This undertaking to map the system of connections which make us what we are — to map what Seung called "the connectome" in his 2011 book — can seem, from a certain point of view, like a glorious and heroic step backward.

Trying to understand how the brain works by looking at the behavior of individual cells — so observed David Marr, one of modern cognitive science's foundational figures writing in the late 1970s — would be like trying to understand how a bird flies by examining the behavior of individual feathers. To understand flight, you need to understand aerodynamics; only once you get a handle on that can you ask how a structure of feathers, or any other physical system — such as a manufactured airship — can harness aerodynamics in the service of flight.

[For more of this story, written by Alva Noe, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/...-map-that-we-can-use]