The nature of the brain’s “representations”—if there is such a thing—of the world, the self, the past and present, remains puzzling, as the very different approaches we have described suggest: Changeux’s view of “long-lasting global representations”; Edelman and Tononi’s view of memory as constructive recategorizations, and Rizzolatti’s stunning discovery of mirror neurons, suggesting that we know and understand others, to some extent, through neural imitation. And as these differing views show… we are still far from a full understanding of the nature of memory, perception, and meaning.

So Israel Rosenfield, a doctor and historian, and Edward Ziff, a biochemistry professor, conclude their review How The Mind Works: Revelations in a forthcoming New York Review of Books piece. What I liked about this essay is its clear statement on starting points to think about our brains and its insightful summaries and critique of recent work. But in the end I was still left with a “So what?” Their hints at subjective psychology, the acting brain, and relational representation remained the side dishes, rather than the main course. I’ll deal with that main course later this week, and in this post cover Changeux and Edelman.

Rosenfield and Ziff give us a quick historical summary of work on the neuron as a cell that uses electrochemical signaling. Early research by Hermann von Hermholtz and Santiago Ramon y Cajal contributed to defeating the notion that neurons functioned in a similar fashion to the dominate communication technology of that time, the telegraph. Neurons are slow in direct contrast to the speedy telegraph.

Today we still draw on an equally speedy but wrong view, the computer analogy. Jean-Pierre Changeux helped overturn the computer view using both basic research and basic biological theory, evolution by natural selection. (Still, I was left asking myself, why couldn’t we have learned from the failure of the telegraph model in the first place…)

As Rosenfield and Ziff note, Changeux’s research showed that “the human brain therefore does not make optimal use of the resources of the physical world; it makes do instead with components inherited from simpler organisms… that have survived over the course of biological evolution.”

Continue reading “Jean-Pierre Changeux, Gerald Edelman, and How the Mind Works”