My grandmother was a computer, and I don’t mean there was a keypad on her chest. My grandmother calculated orbits of stars, with logarithmic tables and a slide ruler. But in which sense are brains similar to the devices we currently call computers, and in which sense not? What’s the difference between what they can do? And is Roger Penrose right in saying that Gödel’s theorem tells us human thought can’t just be computation? That’s what we’ll talk about today.
Throughout the brain’s cortex, neurons are arranged in six distinctive layers, which can be readily seen with a microscope. A team of MIT and Vanderbilt University neuroscientists has now found that these layers also show distinct patterns of electrical activity, which are consistent over many brain regions and across several animal species, including humans.
For the third of our lives that we spend in slumber, our minds take up residence in the unknown regions of the subconscious. We dream, though we don’t fully know why. And while these nightly mashups of images and storylines have captured the imagination for generations, modern science largely believes that dreams have no effect on daily life.
