a name of a brain place can describe, much less explain in the language of physical

a name of a brain place can describe, much less explain in the language of physical or physiological mechanism, a patient’s illogical thoughts, feelings of hopelessness, irrational rage or prayerful gratitude. There remains a wide gap between ideas about the mechanisms of human symbolic processing and those involving the structures and functions of neuronal components and their connectivities in the brain, particularly when perceived as regionally segmented meat. Yet this report of Professor Judd’s finger-pointing plastic brain ritual should not elicit surprise since iconic manipulation is certainly not new to the practices of priesthood. In contrast with neuropsychiatry’s behavioral attributions to brain parts as an explanatory pantheon of mysterious doers, absent of mechanical specifics, the fields of physics turn to more abstract and general mathematical and statistical, so- called phenomenological laws, such as those of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. The accounts of Feynman’s abstract and general thermodynamic development of conservation of energy as well as equilibrium thermodynamics discussed previously serve as relevant examples. These abstract models have been found to capture the behavior common to diverse physical systems involving (often still unknown) differing physical mechanisms. Consistency of description, reliability, weighs in before predictive validity, which, with maturation of the research area, gradually becomes detailed mechanistic understanding with the eventual goal being derivation from the first principles of physics. The painful truth is that that in spite of evocative claims made to the contrary in the 1990-2000 Decade of the Brain, this level of understanding at the interface of neurobiological hardware and software remains unbreached. Some recent attempts are interesting. One of the current research themes about real single neurons in real brains (in contrast with the silicon chip modules used in neural network computer simulations), involve widely distributed neurons that discharge in temporal synchrony. These phenomena have been described by Max Planck’s Wolf Singer, Christoff Koch of California Institute of Technology and Florida Atlantic University’s Steven Bressler and others with words such as synchronization, phase locking, coherence and binding. Binding is an intuitively seductive word that premises that two, even widely spatially separated, brain regions that manifest neuronal signals of 98 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013598