we wrong to compare the brains of our technology?

In 1610 the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei published

, a book of telescopic observations of the night sky and the heavens were opened the imagination busy and ambitious. Johannes Kepler, designed a manned voyage to the Moon The Dream

(1634). Galileo has given us much to expect. But the world turns out to be what we expected.

Writer

neuroscientists recognized award-winning films of today are like those of Galileo. The images that derive their fMRI scans, the location of blood flow in the brain of the living, are the equivalent of Galileo's drawings of the mountains of the moon. These are magnificent achievements -. But the beginning of the story, not an end

The brain is bigger than the sky

not on the science of the mind. That's how the ideas of science are in the culture at large. Appleyard is a scientific, rigorous and intelligent. It is also very good in this line dangerously low on the science of consciousness and no longer starts the moonlight. Not all moonlight is bad for us. Kepler Dream

was and is a treat. But culture can not live alone in the moonlight, and Appleyard agrees that we consume more than good for us.

The human brain is the most complex object we know. To describe it, thinkers and writers, understandably, to reach the most difficult imaginable. Four centuries ago, the brain was considered a particularly diabolical plumbing problem, and later became a steam engine and telegraph office. Now it's "like the Internet." The brain is a computer network is a heating system. Neuroscientists have known adequately. The unfounded assumption that the brain is a type of computer for meat has curiously combined with the computer revolution, many rational people the idea that one day our computers will soon gain consciousness. If the power of simple calculation, of course, be aware of any complex system. That the climate is conscious. The oceans are thinking when they came back.

Second, they can distinguish between the work of individual scientists and science raises broader questions of philosophy. Early evidence is a lively and concise to land, the description of how a functional MRI scanner - a machine that can create maps of the brain at work. Not many pages later, Appleyard is a philosopher, and provides an excellent explanation of what reductionism is and why scientific phenomena anatomised just small parties have lost a lot of scientists to explore reality.