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How have humans through the ages tried to crack the mysteries of the brain, and why are our theories always yoked to the most recent technologies? What does the history of brain science have to do with bumps on the skull, electricity, Frankenstein, animatronics, telegraphs, telephone exchanges, computers, and LLMs? What's the next metaphor we'll use to try to capture the brain’s magic? Join this episode of Inner Cosmos with guest Matthew Cobb to find out.
Lifting a coffee cup to your lips seems so effortless that we forget about the staggeringly complex 3-pound puppeteer directing the action. Inside your skull buzzes a dense network of almost 100 billion neurons, each firing tiny electrical impulses up to hundreds of times per second. From this vast electrical storm arises the simple motion of hand to cup, cup to mouth.
This same activity produces your awareness, your hopes and dreams, the agony and the ecstasy, the joy, the love, the light. This activity generates the memory of your name & first kiss & what you had for breakfast. Out of this hurricane of invisible electrochemical activity emerges the shimmering phenomenon we call you.
For centuries, humans have been trying to make sense of this wrinkled, three-pound organ. It’s been clear for a while that the brain is where the essence of a person resides… because you remain you even if you lose a leg, kidney, or eye. But damage even a tiny patch of brain tissue, and that alters who you are: your personality, your decisions, your ability to speak, your sense of reality.
That realization slowly drove the recognition that the brain is the seat of consciousness and behavior. But uncovering how it actually works has proven far more elusive.
As far as I can tell, there have been two main obstacles to progress. First, all the action is microscopic: when you look directly at the brain, all you see is a convoluted mass with the texture of mashed potatoes. Nothing about its wrinkly appearance reveals its staggering complexity. (In fact, ancient cultures often dismissed it entirely during autopsies, focusing instead on organs they figured were way more important.)
Second, to protect the delicate computational material, the brain is locked away inside the fortress of the skull. That protection is essential, but it makes direct investigation of the brain extremely difficult.
So for centuries, scientists have tried to decipher this microscopic and vaulted machinery as best they could, using the metaphors and technologies of their own time.
In the 1600s, when hydraulics dominated the imagination, the brain was thought to be a system of pumps, pipes, and valves. By the 1700s, electricity had captured attention, and the brain became a kind of generator or battery. In the 1800s, the telegraph inspired the idea of nerves as wires sending coded signals from station to station. In the 20th century, the brain became a telephone exchange, then an electronic circuit, finally a digital computer (and now perhaps a large language model).
Each metaphor brought fresh insight and suggested new experiments. Hydraulics led to studies of fluid pressure, telegraphy to research on nerve conduction, and computing to the rise of artificial neural networks. But every metaphor also imposed blind spots. We learned to see the brain through the lens of our latest inventions, often mistaking those metaphors for the thing itself.
Today, the tools are more advanced (fMRI, optogenetics, gene editing, etc). But the fundamental mystery endures: how does a hunk of biological tissue generate the first-person experience of being alive? How does matter become mind? How might today’s metaphors be blinding us in ways we can’t yet recognize?
So for this episode, I called my colleague Matthew Cobb, an evolutionary neurobiologist at the University of Manchester who also happens to be a historian of science. His book The Idea of the Brain traces not just the discoveries of neuroscience, but also the stories, metaphors, and cultural forces that have shaped how we understand the brain across centuries. Again and again, he shows how scientists have believed they were on the verge of a complete explanation, only to discover that the brain was still more intricate & more mysterious than expected.
Understanding the history of the brain gives you a sense of the sheer collective effort that underlies our present-day knowledge. We’re here because of thousands of thinkers and doers, each contributing a fragment that seemed small in the moment, slowly assembling a mosaic that no one could (or can) see in its entirety.
So please check out this episode, in which we dive into our species’ unflagging attempt to understand the organ that is itself doing the understanding.
