Our Quest to Understand the Brain – with Matthew Cobb

The brain might be the most complicated object in the universe. Matthew Cobb explains how we know what we know.

Matthew's book "The Idea of the Brain" is available now on Amazon: https://geni.us/iLZu

Today we tend to picture the brain as a computer. Earlier scientists thought about it in their own technological terms: as a telephone switchboard, or a clock, or all manner of fantastic mechanical or hydraulic devices. Could the right metaphor unlock the brain's deepest secrets once and for all?

Galloping through centuries of wild speculation and ingenious, sometimes macabre anatomical investigations, scientist and historian Matthew Cobb reveals how we came to our present state of knowledge. Our latest theories allow us to create artificial memories in the brain of a mouse, and to build AI programmes capable of extraordinary cognitive feats. A complete understanding seems within our grasp.

Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/hTl2zXPjGWs

Matthew Cobb is professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, where his research focuses on the sense of smell, insect behaviour and the history of science.

This lecture was filmed in the Ri on 12 March 2020.

Early on Cobb explains that the ancient Greeks, Aristotle in particular, believed that the heart was the seat of thought. It wasn't until the late eighteenth century that we were confident that, yes, thinking took place in the brain. Thus we have Joseph Priestly in 1775:

Cobb goes on the say that this realization was the result of a single crucial experiment or observation, but rather it was a matter of "gradual certainty through a whole series of anatomical and experimental studies." Cobb then goes on to discuss how thinkers and scientists used technology to understand how the brain operated.