Here Is A Neuron That Fires When

Lofty Questions About The Mind Are Fascinating To Ask, Philosophers Have Been Asking Them For Three Millennia Both In India Where I Am From And Here In The West - But It Is Only In The Brain That We Can Eventually Hope To Find The Answers.

Any Ape Can Reach For A Banana, But Only Humans Can Reach For The Stars.

There Are 100 Billion Neurons In The Adult Human Brain, And Each Neuron Makes Something Like 1,000 To 10,000 Contacts With Other Neurons In The Brain. Based On This, People Have Calculated That The Number Of Permutations And Combinations Of Brain Activity Exceeds The Number Of Elementary Particles In The Universe.

People Think Of Art And Science As Being Fundamentally Opposed To Each Other, Because Art Is About Celebrating Individual Human Creativity, And Science Is About Discovering General Principles, Not About Individual People. But In Fact, The Two Have A Lot In Common, And The Creative Spirit Is Similar In Both.

What Do We Mean By "knowledge" Or "understanding"? And How Do Billions Of Neurons Achieve Them? These Are Complete Mysteries. Admittedly, Cognitive Neuroscientists Are Still Very Vague About The Exact Meaning Of Words Like "understand," "think," And Indeed The Word "meaning" Itself.