On the FutureLearn course "Psychology and Mental Health" I am currently
following I have just reached a section which starts:
I would be the first to agree that the New
Scientist is good at explaining science in easily readable terms – having been a
fan since I brought a copy of the very first issues when I was a student. Its
web site has good descriptions of the brain, and its components, and other
aspects of modern brain research. However there is a glaring omission – there
is no overall description of “how it works” which explains how the neurons in
the brain work together to support intelligent human mental activities.
The New Scientist is not alone. The
Scientific American has just published a special issue “Humans: Why we’re
unlike any other species on the planet” which fails to answer the same
question. In fact you can read book after book about the brain, and also many
research papers, and while there are a number of purely descriptive surmises, the
best answer you can get is that there is currently no adequate predictive model
of how the brain’s biological computer actually works to convert activity at
individual cell level into a system capable of doing what the human brain can
obviously do.
I am currently working on "An EvolutionaryModel of Human Intelligence “ which attempts to show how
activity at the neuron level supports the high level mental activities which characterize
the human species and it is perhaps appropriate to add my ideas on the subject
with outline details of my research.
