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The Brain from Inside Out

György Buzsáki

1
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To my family, with whom everything, without whom nothing.
vi
 C ON T E N T S

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv

1. The Problem 1

2. Causation and Logic in Neuroscience 33

3. Perception from Action 53

4. Neuronal Assembly: The Fundamental Unit of Communication 83

5. Internalization of Experience: Cognition from Action 101

6. Brain Rhythms Provide a Framework for Neural Syntax 141

7. Internally Organized Cell Assembly Trajectories 165

8. Internally Organized Activity During Offline Brain States 199

9. Enhancing Brain Performance by Externalizing Thought 219

10. Space and Time in the Brain 241

11. Gain and Abstraction 279

12. Everything Is a Relationship: The Nonegalitarian, Log-​Scaled Brain 301

13. The Brain’s Best Guess 337

14. Epilogue 357

References 361
Index 417
vi
 P RE FAC E

A theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear

that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street.
—​Joseph-​Diez Gergonne1

The most complicated skill is to be simple.

—​Dejan Stojanovic2

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of

enthusiasm.
—​Winston Churchill3

As far as I remember, there was only one rule. “Be home before it gets dark.” The
definition of darkness was, of course, negotiable. My childhood included many
animals: turtles, a family of hedgehogs, fish in a toilet tank, pigeons, and barn
owls, in addition to our family’s cats and chickens. Our pig, Rüszü, and I were
good friends. He was always eager to get out from his sty and follow me to our
favorite destination, a small, shallow bay of Lake Balaton, in Hungary. A short
walk across the street from our house, Lake Balaton was the source of many
happy moments of my early life. It provided everything I needed: swimming
during the summer, skating in the winter, and fishing most of the year around.
I lived in complete freedom, growing up in the streets with other kids from
the neighborhood. We made up rules, invented games, and built fortresses
from rocks and abandoned building material to defend our territory against
imagined invaders. We wandered around the reeds, losing ourselves only to

1. As quoted in Barrow-​Green and Siegmund-​Schultze (2016).

2. https://​www.poemhunter.com/​poem/​simplicity-​30/​.
3. https://​philosiblog.com/​.
x

x P reface

find our way out, developing a sense of direction and self-​reliance. I grew up
in a child’s paradise, even if those years were the worst times of the communist
dictatorship for my parents’ generation.
Summers were special. My parents rented out our two bedrooms, bathroom,
and kitchen to vacationers from Budapest, and we temporarily moved up to
the attic. Once my father told me that one of the vacationers was a “scientist-​
philosopher” who knew everything. I wondered how it would be possible to
know everything. I took every opportunity to follow him around to figure out
whether I could discover something special about his head or eyes. But he
appeared to be a regular guy with a good sense of humor. I asked him what
Rüszü thought about me and why he could not talk to me. He gave me a long
answer with many words that I did not understand, and, at the end, he vic-
toriously announced, “Now you know.” Yet I did not, and I kept wondering
whether my pig friend’s seemingly affectionate love was the same as my feelings
for him. Perhaps my scientist knew the answer, but I did not understand the
words he used. This was the beginning of my problem with words used in sci-
entific explanations.
My childhood curiosity has never evaporated. I became a scientist as a con-
sequence of striving to understand the true meaning behind explanations.
Too often, what my peers understood to be a logical and straightforward an-
swer remained a mystery to me. I had difficulty comprehending gravity in
high school. OK, it is an “action at a distance” or a force that attracts a body
having mass toward another physical body. But are these statements not just an-
other way of saying the same thing? My physics teacher’s answer about gravity
reminded me the explanation of Rüszü’s abilities given by “my” scientist. My
troubles with explanatory terms only deepened during my medical student and
postdoctoral years after I realized that my dear mentor, Endre Grastyán, and
my postdoctoral advisor, Cornelius (Case) Vanderwolf, shared my frustration.
Too often, when we do not understand something, we make up a word or two
and pretend that those words solve the mystery.4
Scientists started the twenty-​first century with a new goal: understanding
ourselves and the complexity of the hardware that supports our individual
minds. All of a sudden, neuroscience emerged from long obscurity into eve-
ryday language. New programs have sprung up around the world. The BRAIN
Initiative in the United States put big money into public–​private collaborations
aimed at developing powerful new tools to peek into the workings of the brain.
In Europe, the Human Brain Project promises to construct a model of the

4. These may be called “filler terms,” which may not explain anything; when used often enough
in scientific writing, the innocent reader may believe that they actually refer to a mechanism
(e.g., Krakauer et al., 2017).
P reface  xi

human brain—​perhaps an overambitious goal—​in the next decade. The main

targets of the China Brain Project are the mechanisms of cognition and brain
diseases, as well as advancing information technology and artificial intelligence
projects.
Strikingly, none of these programs makes a priority of understanding the
general principles of brain function. That decision may be tactically wise be-
cause discoveries of novel principles of the brain require decades of maturation
and distillation of ideas. Unlike physics, which has great theories and is con-
stantly in search for new tools to test them, neuroscience is still in its infancy,
searching for the right questions. It is a bit like the Wild West, full of unknowns,
where a single individual has the same chance to find the gold of knowledge
as an industry-​scale institution. Yet big ideas and guiding frameworks are
much needed, especially when such large programs are outlined. Large-​scale,
top-​down, coordinated mega projects should carefully explore whether their
resources are being spent in the most efficient manner. When the BRAIN
Initiative is finished, we may end up with extraordinary tools that will be used
to make increasingly precise measurements of the same problems if we fail to
train the new generation of neuroscientists to think big and synthesize.
Science is not just the art of measuring the world and converting it into equa-
tions. It is not simply a body of facts but a gloriously imperfect interpretation of
their relationships. Facts and observations become scientific knowledge when
their widest implications are explored with great breadth and force of thinking.
While we all acknowledge that empirical research stands on a foundation of
measurement, these observations need to be organized into coherent theories
to allow further progress. Major scientific insights are typically declared to
be important discoveries only later in history, progressively acquiring cred-
ibility after scrutiny by the community and after novel experiments support
the theory and refute competing ones. Science is an iterative and recursive en-
deavor, a human activity. Recognizing and synthesizing critical insights takes
time and effort. This is as true today as it has always been. A fundamental goal
in neuroscience is identifying the principles of neuronal circuit organization.
My conviction about the importance of this goal was my major motivation for
writing this volume.
Writing a book requires an internal urge, an itching feeling that can be
suppressed temporarily with distraction but always returns. That itch for me
began a while ago. Upon receiving the Cortical Discoverer Prize from the Cajal
Club (American Association of Anatomists) in 2001, I was invited to write a
review for a prominent journal. I thought that the best way to exploit this op-
portunity was to write an essay about my problems with scientific terms and
argue that our current framework in neuroscience may not be on the right
track. A month later arrived the rejection letter: “Dear Gyuri, . . . I hope you
xi

xi i P reface

understand that for the sake of the journal we cannot publish your manuscript”
[emphasis added]. I did not understand the connection between the content of
my essay and the reputation of the journal. What was at stake? I called up my
great supporter and crisis advisor, Theodore (Ted) Bullock at the University
of California at San Diego, who listened carefully and told me to take a deep
breath, put the issue on the back burner, and go back to the lab. I complied.
Yet, the issues kept bugging me. Over the years, I read as much as I could
find on the connection between language and scientific thinking. I learned that
many of “my original ideas” had been considered already, often in great de-
tail and depth, by numerous scientists and philosophers, although those ideas
have not effectively penetrated psychology or neuroscience. Today’s neurosci-
ence is full of subjective explanations that often rephrase but do not really ex-
pound the roots of a problem. As I tried to uncover the origins of widely used
neuroscience terms, I traveled deeper and deeper into the history of thinking
about the mind and the brain. Most of the terms that form the basis of today’s
cognitive neuroscience were constructed long before we knew anything about
the brain, yet we somehow have never questioned their validity. As a result,
human-​concocted terms continue to influence modern research on brain
mechanisms. I have not sought disagreement for its own sake; instead, I came
slowly and reluctantly to the realization that the general practice in large areas
of neuroscience follows a misguided philosophy. Recognizing this problem is
important because the narratives we use to describe the world shape the way we
design our experiments and interpret what we find. Yet another reason I spent
so many hours thinking about the contents of this book is because I believe that
observations held privately by small groups of specialists, no matter how re-
markable, are not really scientific knowledge. Ideas become real only when they
are explained to educated people free of preconceived notions who can ques-
tion and dispute those ideas. Gergonne’s definition, cited at the beginning of
this Preface, is a high bar. Neuroscience is a complex subject. Scientists involved
in everyday research are extremely cautious when it comes to simplification—​
and for good reasons. Simplification often comes at the expense of glossing
over depth and the crucial details that make one scientific theory different from
another. In research papers, scientists write to other scientists in language that
is comprehensible to perhaps a handful of readers. But experimental findings
from the laboratory gain their power only when they are understood by people
outside the trade.
Why is it difficult for scientists to write in simple language? One reason is
because we are part of a community where every statement and idea should be
credited to fellow scientists. Professional science writers have the luxury of bor-
rowing ideas from anyone, combining them in unexpected ways, simplifying
and illuminating them with attractive metaphors, and packaging them in a
P reface  xiii

mesmerizing narrative. They can do this without hesitation because the au-
dience is aware that the author is a smart storyteller and not the maker of the
discoveries. However, when scientists follow such a path, it is hard to distin-
guish, both for them and the audience, whether the beautiful insights and earth-
shaking ideas were sparked from their own brains or from other hard-​working
colleagues. We cannot easily change hats for convenience and be storytellers,
arbitrators, and involved, opinionated players at the same time because we may
mislead the audience. This tension is likely reflected by the material presented
in this book. The topics I understand best are inevitably written more densely,
despite my best efforts. Several chapters, on the other hand, discuss topics that
I do not directly study. I had to read extensively in those areas, think about
them hard, simplify the ideas, and weave them into a coherent picture. I hope
that, despite the unavoidable but perhaps excusable complexity here and there,
most ideas are graspable.
The core argument of this book is that the brain is a self-​organized system
with preexisting connectivity and dynamics whose main job is to generate
actions and to examine and predict the consequences of those actions. This
view—​I refer to it as the “inside-​out” strategy—​is a departure from the dom-
inant framework of mainstream neuroscience, which suggests that the brain’s
task is to perceive and represent the world, process information, and decide
how to respond to it in an “outside-​in” manner. In the pages ahead, I highlight
the fundamental differences between these two frameworks. Many arguments
that I present have been around for quite some time and have been discussed by
outstanding thinkers, although not in the context of contemporary neurosci-
ence. My goal is to combine these ideas in one place, dedicating several chapters
to discussing the merits of my recommended inside-​out treatment of the brain.
Many extraordinary findings have surfaced in neuroscience over the past few
decades. Synthesizing these discoveries so that we can see the forest beyond
the trees and presenting them to readers is a challenge that requires skills most
scientists do not have. To help meet that challenge, I took advantage of a dual
format in this volume. The main text is meant to convey the cardinal message to
an intelligent and curious person with a passion or at least respect for science.
Expecting that the expert reader may want more, I expand on these topics in
footnotes. I also use the footnotes to link to the relevant literature and occasion-
ally for clarification. In keeping with the gold standards of scientific writing,
I cite the first relevant paper on the topic and a comprehensive review whenever
possible. When different aspects of the same problems are discussed by mul-
tiple papers, I attempt to list the most relevant ones.
Obviously, a lot of subjectivity and unwarranted ignorance goes into such a
choice. Although I attempted to reach a balance between summarizing large
chunks of work by many and crediting the deserving researchers, I am aware
xvi

xiv P reface

that I did not always succeed. I apologize to those whose work I may have
ignored or missed. My goals were to find simplicity amid complexity and create
a readable narrative without appearing oversimplistic. I hope that I reached
this goal at least in a few places, although I am aware that I often failed. The
latter outcome is not tragic, as failure is what scientists experience every day in
the lab. Resilience to failure, humiliation, and rejection are the most important
ingredients of a scientific career.
 AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

No story takes place in a vacuum. My intellectual development owes a great

deal to my mentor Endre Grastyán and to my postdoctoral advisor Cornelius
(Case) Vanderwolf. I am also indebted to the many students and postdoctoral
fellows who have worked with me and inspired me throughout the years.5 Their
success in science and life is my constant source of happiness. Without their
dedication, hard work, and creativity, The Brain from Inside Out would not
exist simply because there would not have been much to write about. Many fun
discussions I had with them found their way into my writing.
I thank the outstanding colleagues who collaborated with me on various
projects relating to the topic of this book, especially Costas Anastassiou, László
Acsády, Yehezkel Ben-​Ari, Antal Berényi, Reginald Bickford, Anders Björklund,
Anatol Bragin, Ted Bullock, Carina Curto, Gábor Czéh, János Czopf, Orrin
Devinsky, Werner Doyle, Andreas Draguhn, Eduardo Eidelberg, Jerome (Pete)
Engel, Bruce McEwen, Tamás Freund, Karl Friston, Fred (Rusty) Gage, Ferenc
Gallyas, Helmut Haas, Vladimir Itskov, Kai Kaila, Anita Kamondi, Eric Kandel,
Lóránd Kellényi, Richard Kempter, Rustem Khazipov, Thomas Klausberger,
Christof Koch, John Kubie, Stan Leung, John Lisman, Michael Long, Nikos
Logothetis, András Lörincz, Anli Liu, Attila Losonczy, Jeff Magee, Drew
Maurer, Hannah Monyer, Bruce McNaughton, Richard Miles, István Mody,
Edvard Moser, Lucas Parra, David Redish, Marc Raichle, John Rinzel, Mark
Schnitzer, Fernando Lopes da Silva, Wolf Singer, Ivan Soltész, Fritz Sommer,
Péter Somogyi, Mircea Steriade, Imre Szirmai, Jim Tepper, Roger Traub,
Richard Tsien, Ken Wise, Xiao-​Jing Wang, Euisik Yoon, László Záborszky,
Hongkui Zeng, and Michaël Zugaro.

5. See them here https://​neurotree.org/​beta/​tree.php?pid=5038.

xvi

xv i A cknowledgments

Although I read extensively in various fields of science, books were not my

only source of ideas and inspiration. Monthly lunches with Rodolfo Llinás, my
admired colleague at New York University, over the past five years have enabled
pleasurable exchanges of our respective views on everything from world poli-
tics to consciousness. Although our debates were occasionally fierce, we always
departed in a good mood, ready for the next round.
I would also like to thank my outstanding previous and present colleagues at
Rutgers University and New York University for their support. More generally,
I would like to express my gratitude to a number of people whose examples,
encouragement, and criticism have served as constant reminders of the won-
derful collegiality of our profession: David Amaral, Per Andersen, Albert-​
László Barabási, Carol Barnes, April Benasich, Alain Berthoz, Brian Bland,
Alex Borbely, Jan Born, Michael Brecht, Jan Bures, Patricia Churchland, Chiara
Cirelli, Francis Crick, Winfried Denk, Gerry Edelman, Howard Eichenbaum,
Andre Fenton, Steve Fox, Loren Frank, Mel Goodale, Katalin Gothard, Charlie
Gray, Ann Graybiel, Jim McGaugh, Michale Fee, Gord Fishell, Mark Gluck,
Michael Häusser, Walter Heiligenberg, Bob Isaacson, Michael Kahana, George
Karmos, James Knierim, Bob Knight, Nancy Kopell, Gilles Laurent, Joe
LeDoux, Joe Martinez, Helen Mayberg, David McCormick, Jim McGaugh,
Mayank Mehta, Sherry Mizumori, May-​Britt Moser, Tony Movshon, Robert
Muller, Lynn Nadel, Zoltán Nusser, John O’Keefe, Denis Paré, Liset de la Prida,
Alain Prochiantz, Marc Raichle, Pasko Rakic, Jim Ranck, Chuck Ribak, Dima
Rinberg, Helen Scharfmann, Menahem Segal, Terry Sejnowski, László Seress,
Alcino Silva, Bob Sloviter, David Smith, Larry Squire, Wendy Suzuki, Karel
Svoboda, Gábor Tamás, David Tank, Jim Tepper, Alex Thomson, Susumu
Tonegawa, Giulio Tononi, Matt Wilson, and Menno Witter. There are many
more people who are important to me, and I wish I had the space to thank them
all. Not all of these outstanding colleagues agree with my views, but we all agree
that debate is the engine of progress. Novel truths are foes to old ones.
Without the freedom provided by my friend and colleague Dick Tsien,
I would never have gotten started with this enterprise. Tamás Freund gener-
ously hosted me in his laboratory in Budapest, where I could peacefully focus
on the problem of space and time as related to the brain. Going to scientific
events, especially in far-​away places, has a hidden advantage: long flights and
waiting for connections in airports, with no worries about telephone calls,
emails, review solicitations, or other distractions. Just read, think, and write.
I wrote the bulk of this book on such trips. On two occasions, I missed my plane
because I got deeply immersed in a difficult topic and neglected to respect the
cruelty of time.
But my real thanks go to the generous souls who, at the expense of their
own time, read and improved the various chapters, offered an invaluable
A cknowledgments  xvii

mix of encouragement and criticism, saved me from error, or provided cru-

cial insights and pointers to papers and books that I was not aware of. I am
deeply appreciative of their support: László Acsády, László Barabási, Jimena
Canales, George Dragoi, Janina Ferbinteanu, Tibor Koos, Dan Levenstein, Joe
LeDoux, Andrew Maurer, Sam McKenzie, Lynn Nadel, Liset Menendez de la
Prida, Adrien Peyrache, Marcus Raichle, Dima Rinberg, David Schneider, Jean-​
Jacque Slotine, Alcino Silva, and Ivan Soltész.
Sandra Aamodt was an extremely efficient and helpful supervisor of earlier
versions of the text. Thanks to her experienced eyes and language skills, the
readability of the manuscript improved tremendously. I would also like to ac-
knowledge the able assistance of Elena Nikaronova for her artistic and expert
help with figures and Aimee Chow for compiling the reference list.
Craig Panner, my editor at Oxford University Press, has been wonderful;
I am grateful to him for shepherding me through this process. It was rewarding
to have a pro like him on my side. I owe him a large debt of thanks.
Finally, and above all, I would like to express my eternal love and gratitude
to my wife, Veronika Solt, for her constant support and encouragement and to
my lovely daughters, Lili and Hanna, whose existence continues to make my
life worthwhile.
xvi
 1

The Problem

The confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine

idling, not when it is doing work.
—​Ludwig Wittgenstein1

There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated

often enough.
—​William James2

A dream we dream together is reality.

—​Burning Man 2017

T
he mystery is always in the middle. I learned this wisdom early as
a course instructor in the Medical School of the University at Pécs,
Hungary. In my neurophysiology seminars, I enthusiastically explained
how the brain interacts with the body and the surrounding world. Sensory
stimuli are transduced to electricity in the peripheral sensors, which then
transmit impulses to the midbrain and primary sensory cortices and subse-
quently induce sensation. Conversely, on the motor arc, the direct cortical

1. “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our lan-
guage” (Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations, 1973). See also Quine et al. (2013).
“NeuroNotes” throughout this book aim to remind us how creativity and mental disease are
intertwined (Andreasen, 1987; Kéri, 2009; Power et al., 2015; Oscoz-​Irurozqui and Ortuño,
2016). [NeuroNote: Wittgenstein, a son of one of Austria’s wealthiest families, was severely de-
pressed. Three of his four brothers committed suicide; Gottlieb, 2009].
2. http://​libertytree.ca/​quotes/​William.James.Quote.7EE1.
2

2 T he B rain from I nside  O ut

pathway from the large pyramidal cells of the primary motor cortex and mul-
tiple indirect pathways converge on the anterior horn motor neurons of the
spinal cord, whose firing induces muscular contraction. There was a long
list of anatomical details and biophysical properties of neurons that the cur-
riculum demanded the students to memorize and the instructors to explain
them. I was good at entertaining my students with the details, preparing them
to answer the exam questions, and engaging them in solving mini-​problems.
Yet a minority of them—​I should say the clever ones—​were rarely satisfied
with my textbook stories. “Where in the brain does perception occur?” and
“What initiates my finger movement, you know, before the large pyramidal
cells get fired?”—​were the typical questions. “In the prefrontal cortex” was
my usual answer, before I skillfully changed the subject or used a few Latin
terms that nobody really understood but that sounded scientific enough so
that my authoritative-​appearing explanations temporarily satisfied them. My
inability to give mechanistic and logical answers to these legitimate questions
has haunted me ever since—​as it likely does every self-​respecting neuroscien-
tist.3 How do I explain something that I do not understand? Over the years,
I realized that the problem is not unique to me. Many of my colleagues—​
whether they admit it or not—​feel the same way. One reason is that the brain
is complicated stuff and our science is still in its young phase, facing many
unknowns. And most of the unknowns, the true mysteries of the brain,
are hidden in the middle, far from the brain’s sensory analyzers and motor
effectors. Historically, research on the brain has been working its way in from
the outside, hoping that such systematic exploration will take us some day
to the middle and on through the middle to the output. I often wondered
whether this is the right or the only way to succeed, and I wrote this book to
offer a complementary strategy.
In this introductory chapter, I attempt to explain where I see the stum-
bling blocks and briefly summarize my alternative views. As will be evident
throughout the following chapters, I do believe in the framework I propose.
Some of my colleagues will side with me; others won’t. This is, of course, ex-
pected whenever the frontiers of science are discussed and challenged, and
I want to state this clearly up front. This book is not to explain the understood
but is instead an invitation to think about the most fascinating problems hu-
mankind can address. An adventure into the unknown: us.

3. The term “neuroscientist” was introduced in 1969 when the Society for Neuroscience was
founded in the United States.
Chapter 1. The Problem 3

ORIGIN OF TODAY’S FRAMEWORK

IN NEUROSCIENCE

Scientific interest in the brain began with the epistemological problem of how
the mind learns the “truth” and understands the veridical, objective world.
Historically, investigations of the brain have moved from introspection to ex-
perimentation, and, along this journey, investigators have created numerous
terms to express individual views. Philosophers and psychologists started this
detective investigation by asking how our sensors—​eyes, ears, and nose—​sense
the world "out there," and how they convey its features to our minds. The crux
of the problem lies right here. Early thinkers, such as Aristotle, unintention-
ally assumed a dual role for the mind: making up both the explanandum (the
thing to-​be-​explained) and providing the explanans (the things that explain).4
They imagined things, gave them names, and now, millennia later, we search for
neural mechanisms that might relate to their dreamed-​up ideas.5
As new ideas about the mind were conceived, the list of things to be
explained kept increasing, resulting in a progressive redivision of the brain’s
real estate. As a first attempt, or misstep, Franz Joseph Gall and his nineteenth-​
century followers claimed that our various mental faculties are localized in dis-
tinct brain areas and that these areas could be identified by the bumps and
uneven geography of the skull—​a practice that became known as phrenology
(Figure 1.1). Gall suggested that the brain can be divided into separate "organs,"
which we would call “regions” today. Nineteen of the arbitrarily divided re-
gions were responsible for faculties shared with other animals, such as repro-
duction, memory of things, and time. The remaining eight regions were specific
to humans, like the sense of metaphysics, poetry, satire, and religion. 6 Today,
phrenology is ridiculed as pseudoscience because we know that bumps on
the skull have very little to do with the shape and regionalization of the brain.
Gall represented to neuroscience what Jean-​Baptiste Lamarck represented to

4. Aristotle (1908). We often commit similar mistakes of duality in neuroscience. To explain

our results, we build a “realistic” computational model to convince ourselves and others that the
model represents closely and reliably the “thing-​to-​be-​explained.” At the same time, the model
also serves to explain the biological problem.
5. A concise introduction to this topic is by Vanderwolf (2007). See also Bullock (1970).
6. Gall’s attempt to find homes for alleged functions in the body was not the first one. In
Buddhism, especially in Kundalini yoga, “psychological centers” have been distributed
throughout the entire body, known as chakras or “wheels.” These levels are the genitals (en-
ergy), the navel (fire, insatiable power), heart (imaginary of art, dreams), the larynx (puri-
fication), mystic inwardly looking eye (authority), and the crown of the head (thoughts and
feelings). The different levels are coordinated by the spine, representing a coiled serpent, in a
harmonious rhythmic fashion. See also Jones et al. (2018).
4

4 T he B rain from I nside  O ut

Figure 1.1. A: Franz Joseph Gall and his phrenologist followers believed that our
various mental faculties are localized in distinct brain areas that could be identified by
the bumps and uneven geography of the skull. Phrenology (or cranioscopy) is ridiculed
as pseudoscience today. B: Imaging-​based localization of our alleged cognitive faculties
today. I found more than 100 cognitive terms associated with the prefrontal cortex alone,
some of which are shown here.

evolution. A reminder that being wrong does not mean being useless in science.
Surprisingly, very few have complained about the more serious nonsense, which
is trying to find “boxes” in the brain for human-​invented terms and concepts.
This strategy itself is a bigger crime than its poor implementation—​the failure
to find the right regions.

There Are Too Many Notes

“There are simply too many notes. Just cut a few and it will be perfect,” said
the emperor to the young Mozart. While this was a ludicrous line in the movie
Amadeus, it may be a useful message today in cognitive neuroscience jargon.
There is simply not enough space in the brain for the many terms that have
accumulated about the mind prior to brain research (Figure 1.1). Anyone
versed in neuroanatomy can tell you that Korbinian Brodmann’s monu-
mental work on the cytoarchitectural organization of the cerebral cortex
distinguished 52 areas in the human brain. Many investigators inferred that
differences in intrinsic anatomical patterns amount to functional specializa-
tion. Contemporary methods using multimodal magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI) have identified 180 cortical areas bounded by relatively sharp changes
in cortical architecture, connectivity, and/​or topography. Does this mean that
now we have many more potential boxes in the brain to be equated with our
Chapter 1. The Problem 5

preconceived ideas?7 But even with this recent expansion of brain regions,
there are still many more human-​concocted terms than there are cortical
areas. As I discuss later in the book, cognitive functions usually arise from a
relationship between regions rather than from local activity in isolated areas.
But even if we accept that interregional interactions are more important than
computation in individual areas, searching for correspondences between a
dreamed-​up term and brain activity cannot be the right strategy for under-
standing the brain.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL ROOTS

If cognitive psychology has a birthdate, it would be 1890, when The Principles

of Psychology, written by the American philosopher and psychologist William
James, was published.8 His treatment of the mind–​world connection (the
"stream of consciousness") had a huge impact on avant garde art and literature,
and the influence of his magnum opus on cognitive science and today’s neuro-
science is hard to overestimate. While each of its chapters was an extraordinary
contribution at the time, topics discussed therein are now familiar and accept-
able to us. Just look at the table of contents of that 1890 work:

Volume 1
Chapter IV—​Habit
Chapter VI —​The mind–​stuff theory
Chapter IX—​ The stream of thought
Chapter X—​The consciousness of self
Chapter XI—​Attention
Chapter XII—Conception
Chapter XIII—​Discrimination and comparison
Chapter XIV—​Association
Chapter XV—​Perception of time
Chapter XVI—​Memory

Volume 2
Chapter XVII—​Sensation
Chapter XVIII—​Imagination

7. Brodmann (1909); Glasser et al. (2016). For light reading about a recent quantitative
cranioscopy analysis, see Parker Jones et al. (2018).
8. James (1890).