Metaphor Limits: Brain Version

We still don’t really understand the brain. And we’re limited by the metaphors of our current milieu.

 

That’s my summary of the first half of Matthew Cobb’s new book, The Idea of the Brain. The book is subtitled “the past and future of neuroscience” and I’ve just finished the first two hundred pages in the section labeled PAST. The story is an interesting one, and Cobb is an engaging storyteller. Beginning with ancient myths, then briskly moving on to folks like Hippocrates and Galen, we quickly reach Vesalius. All in the first chapter. From then on things move more slowly, and while there were familiar names, there were many less well-known and interesting characters highlighted by Cobb.

 

Many of us imagine the brain to be something like a computer. That’s the metaphor of today as we are surrounded by such machines. As computers became more powerful, we started talking about artificial intelligence – to distinguish it from our human intelligence, I suppose. Except it’s no longer an artifact, but embedded into our everyday lives. We are now shifting to discussing machine intelligence. Is man a machine? Can a computer-machine be human? Or mimic one cleverly enough such that we can’t tell the difference?

 

Before the computer arrived, the workings of the brain were described with different metaphors: pipes & hydraulics, the telegraph, electrical circuits, and even immaterial forces. Some of these metaphors seem quite outdated today given that we’ve learned a lot about the brain – and that’s it much more complicated than we imagined. And we still can’t explain the nature of consciousness. I’m not even sure we’re close. Perhaps decades or centuries from today, future scientists will look back at the early twenty first century and muse about the strange inadequate ideas and analogies we use. This is the salient lesson I’ve learned from Cobb, and I’ll quote from his opening paragraphs of the PAST.

 

The history of science is rather different from other kinds of history, because science is generally progressive – each state builds upon previous insights, integrating, rejecting or transforming them. This produces what appears to be an increasingly accurate understanding of the world, although that knowledge is never complete, and future discoveries can overthrow what was once seen as the truth… the history of science is not a progression of brilliant theories and discoveries: it is full of chance events, mistakes, and confusion.

 

To properly understand the past… and even to imagine what tomorrow may hold, we must remember that past ideas were not seen as steps on the road to our current understanding. They were fully fledged views in their own right, in all their complexity and lack of clarity. Every idea, no matter how outdated, was once modern, exciting and new. We can be amused at strange ideas from the past, but condescension is not allowed – what seems obvious to us is only that way because past errors, which were generally difficult to detect, were eventually overcome through a great deal of hard work and hard thinking.

 

A great deal of hard work and hard thinking. Is that what I’m doing as a scientist? It feels like that sometimes, and my brain “hurts” when I read a tough-to-understand paper, as I did this afternoon. (I’d summarize it as “Nearness is Not a Number” – and it has to do with mathematical topology and biological evolution.) But I’m amazed at the wonder of being able to read and think about abstract mathematics and relate it to big ideas in the nature of life. How do our three-pound brains even accomplish such a feat? It’s truly amazing. I’m looking forward to learning more as I get to the PRESENT in Cobb’s book. And Onward to the FUTURE!