Why to Study the Brain

Abstract

The brain is the ultimate computational machine in the universe. Despite what was thought about the brain decades and centuries ago, now it is well understood that the brain is a calculator, a machine that does computational things. In other words the brain is something that takes information in its input, elaborates it and then spit-out some result in form of information or actions. Many centuries ago, the brain was the location of the mind. The mind was considered like a mysterious entity where our thought, our consciousness and our feeling resided. The definition of mind of course is still valid today, in some sense. What has changed is the fact that now we know that the mind is the results of a computational process. A very, complex process, presumably a stochastic one, but as far as we know, something that we can define as a computer “algorithm” is running inside our brains. Data are processes in a way that is not yet completely clear, and the result is our entire behavior, our thoughts our actions and our perception of reality