Brain Areas as Models of Thought

A lot of the current literature revolves around brain areas. The area for seeing is in the back of the head, the hippocampus is the area for memory, and the neocortex is for higher areas of thought.

This research is interesting, and it can be very useful for helping diagnose problems for stroke victims.

However, brain areas don't do much to show how we think.

V1 may be an early area for processing vision, but how does it work.

We don't know how to model brain areas.

One reason that this research is so prevalent is that current imaging techniques (eg. MRI) are good for showing which brain areas are highly active.

Unfortunately, similar techniques do not exist for measuring activation of large number of individual neurons in behaving brains.

Finally, it's not clear how modular we are.

Seeing that brain areas are specialised directs our exploration of thought, but brain areas are also the wrong level to model thought.