I HAVE often been asked, when people hear that my research amounts to a quest after the hidden machinery of human thought, “Oh, so that means that you study the brain?”
One part of me wants to reply, “No, no — I think about
Another part of me, however, wants to reply, “
This amusing contradiction has forced me to ask myself, “What do I mean, and what do other people mean, by ‘brain research’?”, and this leads naturally to the question, “What are the structures in the brain that someone could in principle study?” Most neuroscientists, if they were asked such a question, would make a list that would include (at least some of) the following items (listed roughly in order of physical size):
Although these are all legitimate and important objects of neurological study, to me this list betrays a limited point of view. Saying that studying the brain is limited to the study of physical entities such as these would be like saying that literary criticism must focus on paper and bookbinding, ink and its chemistry, page sizes and margin widths, typefaces and paragraph lengths, and so forth. But what about the high abstractions that are the heart of literature — plot and character, style and point of view, irony and humor, allusion and metaphor, empathy and distance, and so on? Where did these crucial essences disappear in the list of topics for literary critics?
My point is simple: abstractions are central, whether in the study of literature or in the study of the brain. Accordingly, I herewith propose a list of abstractions that “researchers of the brain” should be just as concerned with:
I could extend this list arbitrarily. It is merely suggestive, intended to convey my thesis that the term “brain structure” should include items of this general sort. It goes without saying that some of the above-listed theoretical notions are unlikely to have lasting validity, while others may be increasingly confirmed by various types of research. Just as the notion of “gene” as an invisible entity that enabled the passing-on of traits from parents to progeny was proposed and studied scientifically long before any physical object could be identified as an actual carrier of such traits, and just as the notion of “atoms” as the building blocks of all physical objects was proposed and studied scientifically long before individual atoms were isolated and internally probed, so any of the notions listed above might legitimately be considered as invisible structures for brain researchers to try to pinpoint physically in the human brain.