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mystery
 One challenge is that we are still clueless about how the brain represents the content of our thoughts and feelings. Yes, we may know where jealousy happens—or visual images or spoken words—but "where" is not the same as "how." We don't know how the brain holds the logical connections among ideas that spell the difference between "Burr slew Hamilton" and "Hamilton slew Burr," between the image of a woman winking to realign her contact lens and that of a woman winking to flirt. These distinctions don't appear as blobs in a brain scan. They arise from the microcircuitry of the living human brain, and most people don't want to donate their brains to science until they are dead. (As Woody Allen said, "It's my second-favorite organ.") The content of our thoughts may be the province of psychologists studying the brain's software, rather than neurobiologists studying its hardware, for a long time. Another challenge is understanding how the mere darting of ions and oozing of neurochemicals can create the vivid first-person present-tense subjective experience of colors, sounds, itches and epiphanies that make up the self—the soul, if you will. There's no doubt that physiological brain activity is the cause of experience. Thoughts and feelings can be started, stopped or altered by electricity and chemicals, and they throw off signals that can be read with electrodes and other assays. I also have little doubt that we will crack the mystery of consciousness, learning which brain events correlate with experience. Just compare brain activity when a person is awake or anesthetized, or when a novice is thinking about his golf swing and when a pro does it automatically. But why some kinds of brain activity feel like something to you—or, more accurately, are you—is another question, and scientists disagree about how to answer it. Some say that subjective experience is unobservable and not a proper topic for science. Some say that once we can distinguish conscious brain processes from unconscious ones and show how they cause behavior, there is nothing left to explain; people who are looking for some extra ingredient are just confused. Some concede that sentience is still a mystery, but expect that an unborn genius will someday explain it to us as all. Still others suspect that the brain did not evolve to grasp the answer, any more than it can visualize what came before the Big Bang or the shape of a curved 4-D universe. If you think the answer is obvious, you are prepared for the ultimate triumph of the brain science of tomorrow. The synapse scanner has been perfected, and you can download a backup copy of your mind into a brainlike computer that will outlast your body. Unfortunately the scanner destroys the tissue it scans, so you have to choose between your old brain and a new one. The new brain will react and behave exactly like you—but would it be you? If you say yes, are you confident enough to step into the scanner? PAGE 1 | 2 |
Back to Question Page Will a Killer Asteroid Hit the Earth? Will the Brain Understand Itself? Will We Travel Back (Or Forward) in Time? Will Someone Build a Perpetual Motion Machine? Will We Have A Final Theory Of Everything? Will We Discover Another Universe? Will We Figure Out How Life Began? Will Anyone Ever Run a Three Minute Mile? |