Module 4. Tools of Discovery and Older Brain Structures

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©The New Yorker Collection, 1992, Gahan Wilson, from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.

“I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.”

Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone”

The mind seeking to understand the brain—that is among the ultimate scientific challenges. And so it will always be. To paraphrase cosmologist John Barrow, a brain simple enough to be fully understood is too simple to produce a mind able to understand it.

When you think about your brain, you’re thinking with your brain—by firing across millions of synapses and releasing billions of neurotransmitter molecules. Indeed, say neuroscientists, the mind is what the brain does.