What is "brains"

Usage examples of "brains".

The fact that philosophers, modelers and neurobiologists are actually listening to one another, and that computer people have at last begun to show some respect for biological as well as artefactual brains, clearly makes their analyses an advance over the earlier ones, in which Al enthusiasts tended to run away with preconceived notions of what nerve cells did, and soon cut off all meaningful contact with the biological phenomena which the neurobiologists were studying.

Are all our past experiences, as some schools of psychoanalysis maintain, encoded in some way within our brains, so that, if only we could find the key to accessing them, every detail of our past would become as transparent to us as is the present moment of our consciousness?

The methods of science, or at least biological science, they would maintain, cannot provide understanding of the mind, either because the mind is fundamentally inaccessible to materialist investigation or because our techniques, while they may be applicable to understanding animal brains and behaviour, fail when confronted with the complexities of human thought, speech and social existence.

Can I integrate the minuscule observations of this behaviour of the chicks I work with and the chemistry of their brains with such richness of evocation?

In the next chapter I ask you simply to come with me through a day in the life of the lab as I go through the routine tasks of experimentation, training chicks, dissecting their brains, measuring their biochemical constituents in quantities of thousandths of a milligram, and trying to extract meaning from the tables of figures that these measurements produce.

Just why brains are not computers, and why computer memory is a poor pun for human brain memory, will then become apparent.

Studying animal brains and memory provides us, I shall show, with a theory, based on the properties and actions of individual nerve cells and their modification by experience.

I am going to have to compare a particular set of biochemical processes in the brains of chicks that have been treated in several different ways.

I packed the brains in a thermos of ice, rushed them to the lab and prevailed on one of my colleagues to show me where the different bits were, bits which I had only known in the past by obscure dog-latin anatomical labels but which I now saw corresponded to real masses of cells.

During these two weeks their brains grow rapidly, and by the time their eyes open almost all the neurons and glia are present, and a myriad of synaptic connections have been formed between the neurons.

Computers which worked like or could replace brains became not merely a science fiction but a serious military goal.

The speed limitation could be overcome if computers could be designed more like brains - that is, capable of parallel and distributed rather than sequential and linear operations.

But they have also attracted a surge of enthusiasm amongst neurobiologists, many of whom believe that here at last is a model which comes close to what brains - or at least parts of brains -might actually be like.

But, in developing it, its protagonists have moved away from how biological brains and psychological minds might work and instead concentrated on solving problems embedded in the silicon of computer chips and in mathematical logic - an approach which may produce bigger and better machines, but has become entirely indifferent to their relationship with the biological systems they were once attempting to model.

I want to emphasize that brains and the organisms they inhabit, above all human brains and human beings, are not closed systems, like the molecules of a gas inside a sealed jar.