TO THE EDITOR: The Brain’s Depths
Re “Learning How Little We Know” (“The Map Makers” series, Nov. 11):
As a neuroscientist, I find that the greatest obstacle to progress is not the daunting complexity of the brain but the human desire to believe that everything about our thoughts and behaviors can be explained in simple terms or has already been figured out. Physicists and chemists don’t need to work against a tide of laypeople and media charlatans proposing theories for intelligence, depression, creativity, anxiety, sleep, memory, etc. The simpler the explanation (______can cure autism! You’re a right-brained person!), the more likely it is to spread.
Each time one of us makes one of those small, incremental discoveries, we have to shout above the noise.
Shawn, Pennsylvania, posted to nytimes.com
Perhaps the $4.5 billion focus on the brain is misdirected. It is consciousness that is the real mystery, and the assumption that consciousness is a byproduct of the brain may be erroneous. We may be looking in all the wrong places.
Shelli Joye, Northern California, posted to nytimes.com
I hope Larry Abbott inspires some other computational physicists to change course. Imagine the progress if such “quants,” now writing algorithms for Wall Street, turned their talents to neuroscience.
JBS, Calgary, posted to nytimes.com
[For more go to http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11...ancing-the-bomb.html]
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