This morning I read an op-ed in the New York Times by Lisa Feldman Barrett titled “Your Brain is Not for Thinking”. Her argument was that the primary function of the brain is to keep the body going, not to think. From an evolutionary perspective this is obviously true, however surprising we find it. Throughout most of evolutionary history the brain’s only function was to monitor and control the body. Thinking is a relatively recent thing that humans do, and humans are a very young species. Most brains in the world, of course are non-human, and we hesitate to say they “think” in the same way humans do. This reminded me that I hadn’t yet written a review of Matthew Cobb’s splendid “The Idea of the Brain”. Let’s remedy that. It’s weird how the most interesting thing about the book is ancient research yet that’s just 1 single chapter! The remaining 14 chapters is largely research max 300 years old. I would have really enjoyed a book about ancient history and this feels like it should have been it. The writing style is just dry and humourless enough to not really engage you unless you really like the topic. It’s also waaaaay too many name drops. A powerful examination of what we think we know about the brain and why -- despite technological advances -- the workings of our most essential organ remain a mystery. Wie weit ist dieses Hirn-Feld, was wissen wir und was wissen wir noch nicht? Auf was sollten wir in Zukunft einen Augenmerk werfen, damit wir beispielsweise Menschen mit ernsthaften Erkrankungen helfen können. In the 19th century, the electrical paradigm became less spark-like, and more like that modern miracle, the telegraph. Brain studies shifted from mechanism to function. Phrenologists measured lumps in the skull, on the theory that specific functions and capabilities arose from specific parts of the brain, so that talents and deficiencies could be explained by having excess or deficient brain matter, which one could discover by measuring lumps and dips in the skull. Thus one could “prove” that someone was a natural criminal, laborer, or intellectual by measuring the skull. For example, the fact that men’s brains are bigger than women’s was taken to prove that men are more intelligent than women. Phrenology was eventually discredited when scientists began looking at the actual brain, rather than the skull. Parts of the brain were indeed sometimes associated with mental abilities, but these were not enlarged nor did they lie beneath lumps. Still, some capabilities such as “intelligence” did not have seem to be localized. A surprisingly acrimonious debate emerged over whether specific mental activities were localized in the brain or whether they arose from the brain as a whole. This is an active debate, even today.

We tend to assume that our models of the brain are correct. For example, we “instinctively” think of the brain as separate from the body, the seat of consciousness, as a computer, and as a collection of neurons; we “instinctively” think that what the brain does is think (Cobb’s argument), or remember, or create consciousness. Cobb documents that each of these ways of understanding the brain are relatively modern and incomplete—not instinctive or obvious at all.Aghjayan, S. L., et al. (2022). Aerobic exercise improves episodic memory in late adulthood: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Regarding the thought experiment presented here, however, placing an electrode at the cell body to generate the cellular output effectively bypasses the critical nexus point in the apical dendrite. We, therefore, predict that the replay of activity at the cell bodies of pyramidal cells would, in this case, completely entail the former influence of the apical dendrite. Furthermore, DIT is agnostic about the intrinsic necessity of apical causality, per se, versus the resultant firing activity at the cell body. In this respect, DIT does not inform us whether the brain is conscious under replay or whether scattered brains are conscious.

Around the same time, the craze for phrenology produced detailed maps of how mental functions were localised in certain parts of the brain, which were incorrect, although the principle of (partial) localisation of brain function remains valid. Evolutionary theory meanwhile threw a spanner into the works by highlighting our utter ignorance of how a messily evolved lump of grey blancmange can give rise to subjective experience, thought, and On the Origin of Species itself.Memory. Very basic stuff. A bit of a letdown, it's this basic. He goes over some of the big new experiments, but we don’t learn much about what memory is or how it works.