The Idea of the Brain

One of the most common category errors in neuroscience is the conflation of brains with computers.

Matthew Cobb, who is both a scientist and a historian of science provides a breathtaking and sweeping history of our understanding of the brain - and how it always seems to be epitomised by humanity’s most impressive engineering achievements.

So in the 19th century, the nervous system was described as a telegraph; in the 20th and 21st century, it became a computer.

Cobb shows how these evolving metaphors helped advance neuroscience, but also how overindexing on that computer metaphor is beginning to seriously limit… show more.

You might think history has little to tell us about a cutting edge technology like neuroscience, but you would be wrong. Cobb takes the reader through a fascinating historical excavation, illustrating how the way in which people have thought about the gray matter between their ears changed from era to era. The brain has always been conceptualized according to the cultural and technological currents of the time, shifting from a vessel for housing animal spirits to a machine to an electric battery. Today, we are accustomed to thinking of the brain as a computer; tomorrow, in the era of neuroscience,… show more.

A fast-moving, endlessly fascinating, yet deeply scholarly history of how we know what we know about the brain. Cobb’s magnum opus traces how our definition of the brain has evolved over the centuries, and is still evolving now. I’ve called it a history, and it says as much on the cover of the UK version, but a good third of the book is actually about the cutting edge of neuroscience, of the marvellous ways we now have of interrogating the brain, and where they may take us in the future.