Blog

October / November 1976

From Pharmacology and the Brain: Since ancient times, medicines have been used to restore mental health or research the mind. It is said that the Homeric physician Polydamas, on his way home to Troy, gave Menelaus and Elena “a medicine for sorrow and anger, a medicine to survive in despair.” There are countless mind-blowing drugs available today. Some have changed the course of medical practice; others have changed the structure of our society. Many of them have more specificity of action and fewer side effects than ever before. The development of such drugs has come in parallel with the increase in our knowledge of how drugs act at the molecular level to change behavior. In this regard, one of the most fruitful research approaches involved the study of how nerve cells interact with other cells in the body and how different drugs can change this connection.

May / June 1987

From Developing Computers That Think Like Us: Neuroscientists have concluded that the architecture of the brain plays a key role in its function. Individual neurons are not smart by themselves, but when they are connected to each other, they become quite smart. The problem is, nobody knows how they do it. It’s not that neurons are fast: when they send their electrochemical messages to other neurons, they are 100,000 times slower than a regular computer switch. But what our brains lack speed, they make up for, as it is sometimes called, “wet software.” The brain contains between 10 billion and a trillion neurons, each of which can be associated with anywhere from 1,000 to 100,000 others. If this vast network of interconnected neurons forms the great collective conspiracy that we call our minds, perhaps a vast interconnected network of mechanical switches could create a machine that thinks.

July / August 2014