aristotle

Ways to think about the brain

Historically, research on the brain has been working its way in from the outside world, hoping that such systematic exploration will take us some day to the middle and on through the middle to the output. Ever since the time of Aristotle, philosophers and scientists have assumed that the brain (or, more precisely, the mind) is initially a blank slate filled up gradually with experience in an outside-in manner. An alternative, brain-centric view, the one I am promoting, is that self-organized brain networks induce a vast repertoire of preformed neuronal patterns. While interacting with the world, some of these initially ‘nonsensical’ patterns acquire behavioral significance or meaning. Thus, experience is primarily a process of matching preexisting neuronal dynamics to events in the world. I suggest that perpetually active, internal dynamic is the source of cognition, a neuronal operation disengaged from immediate senses.