Wiring the Brain

“Cognition” is one of those terms that we use a lot, but which is actually rather hard to define. The question of what constitutes cognition looms large in debates about whether other organisms, besides humans, do it or have it. Most people are willing to grant that many animals are in some way cognitive, but what about simpler critters, like nematodes or jellyfish? Are they capable of cognition? For that matter, what about bacteria or plants? Can they cognize? How about artificial systems, like large language models? Does cognition require a nervous system? Does it necessarily involve “thinking”? Or some kind of “mental” activity? Once you start defining it in that rather circular fashion, you quickly realise we don’t have good definitions of “thinking” or “mental” either!   Is cognition just “what cognitive scientists study”? Or are they only studying a particular version of it – the kind of cognition we see in humans? Maybe there is a less anthropocentric way to define i...

Did you ever get the feeling, when you’re working on some problem (scientific or otherwise), that there are some basic principles at play that elude you, but that must have been worked out already by somebody? That’s certainly been my experience in my career in biology, whether it was in developmental biology, human genetics, neuroscience or other areas. I’ve felt the joy of discovering new components of systems and working out some interactions and pathways, but also a nagging feeling that I was not seeing the whole picture – that I was elucidating details of what was happening, but not grasping what the system was doing . I often felt like I lacked the principled framework to even approach that question. This was not because such frameworks don’t exist but because I had never learned about them – systems principles had simply not been part of my education.   This seems to be true across many disciplines. We’re all so specialised that we have to concentrate on the specifics of...

When living creatures perceive something, they’re concerned with two questions: What is it? and: What should I do about it ? You might think that the machinery for answering those questions evolved in that order – like you’d have to know what something is before you can know what to do about it – but it seems likely to have been the opposite. The actions of the simplest creatures when faced with various stimuli in the world are mostly coordinated by pragmatic couplings – signals that are prescriptive rather than descriptive . But these mechanisms laid the foundation for the evolution of decoupled internal representations with true semantic content.   For living organisms to go on persisting – which, let’s face it, is their whole schtick – they have to take in energy and raw materials (food, oxygen) and use them to keep their internal economy humming. Many organisms manage this process – known as homeostasis – by staying put and letting resources come to them. The problem with ...