Building a Better Brain

Understanding and improving the mechanisms of consciousness.

MARK WILLIAMS

Neuroscientists have discovered that an adult nervous system is capable of growing new neurons. Magnetic imaging has mapped how a human brain lights up when calculating sums, playing jazz, or contemplating God. New therapies, coupled with genetic diagnostics, promise to repair damaged minds. But as the press excitedly reports such things, it insists that neuroscience’s greatest prize—understanding consciousness—remains as elusive as ever.

It’s difficult to grasp that science may soon understand the mechanisms of consciousness; indeed, most people prefer their old assumptions about the ineffable mind. But neuroscientists have gained a much fuller picture of how the human brain works than most people—even most life scientists—realize.

One result of this is that the scientia (knowledge) of the human brain will inevitably become techne (art). Specifically, the new neuroscience will bring a revolution in psychopharmacological technology. Advocates will cast the new drugs as tools to build the souls men and women want. Opponents of the new treatments will invoke Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The most thoughtful critics will attack the new drugs as a radical project to reprogram minds into something counter-evolutionary, arguing that people are remodeling the seat of human thought into an astronaut’s couch. They won’t be far wrong; the new drugs will radically change human thought.

But that debate is still a couple of decades away. For now, new discoveries about molecules, cells, circuits, and their roles in human brains are just beginning to lead neuroscientists toward an explanation of how single neurons communicate to create consciousness.

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