The Ever Elusive Organ: Why the Brain Still Defies Understanding

Although the field of neuroscience as we know it is relatively young - emerging around the 1970s - human fascination with the brain stretches back millennia. For centuries, the heart was widely viewed as the centre of our emotional and spiritual lives, until the Ancient Greeks became the first recorded to challenge this heart-centric view. In the first section of The Idea of the Brain, Matthew Cobb traces the historical and intellectual journey to understand the brain as the seat of thought and consciousness. 

Cobb begins by highlighting the dominant theories that shaped how individuals and society conceptualised the brain over centuries. At times, this “past” section reads as a dense, chronological checklist of renowned scientists and philosophers, accompanied by gruesome descriptions of experimental studies carried out in an era before ethical approval. One strength of these early sections is his detailing of when various theories took hold in society. For example, the 17th century was framed as a tipping point, the point at which the brain was more consistently recognised as the biological basis for consciousness, even as outdated ideas - such as blood being the vessel  for the spirit - persisted. Later on in the 19th century, Volta’s notion that animals possessed inherent electrical properties gained traction through the widespread circulation of the text Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, popularising the link between the brain, the mind, and electricity.

He further describes the 19th-century “marriage” of the brain and cognition, including phrenology (the brainchild of Franz Gall). The pseudoscience, phrenology, was based on three insights that still hold influence: (1) the brain is the organ of all sensation and voluntary movement, (2) different regions of the brain have specialised functions, and (3) a comparative approach with other animals is crucial to understand its functional development. Gall’s contemporary, Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens, provided counter-evidence; by removing select parts of animal brains, she discovered that mental functions seemed to be distributed across the cortex, illustrating the early debate between distributed and localised function.

A more significant shift emerged when associationist philosophy that dated from the 18th century intersected with emerging neurophysiology, aided by the development of technologies like Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s Golgi staining, which revealed the structural diversity of nerve cell structure and their layered organisation . The 1960s discovery of neurotransmitters - the chemical messengers that transmit signals between nerve cells - via histochemistry, rather than solely pharmacology or electrophysiology, further revolutionised our understanding. From the mid-1980s onward, neuroscientists and psychologists turned to computational approaches - parallel distributed processing, neural networks, and deep learning - that laid groundwork for modern artificial intelligence. With the development and widespread adoption of imaging techniques from the mid-20th century onwards, neuroscience had taken its contemporary form. 

A running thread through our unfolding exploration of the brain and how it works is the way that humans use metaphors to conceptualise it. Cobb repeatedly returns to the utility and pitfalls of using metaphors in influencing scientific paradigms. For example, he noted the limitations of viewing the brain as a ‘machine’ that needs to be taken apart to discover how it works, highlighting that many brain functions - from the rhythmic grinding of a lobster’s stomach to human consciousness - may be emergent properties, impossible to predict by analysing individual components alone. This sceptical tone  extends to Cobb’s frank critique of the limited progress of large-scale, resource-intensive initiatives like the European Union’s Human Brain Project (now nearing a decade of work and costing hundreds of millions of euros) or American attempts to map the human “connectome.” He is doubtful that these efforts will yield breakthroughs comparable to the Higgs boson in physics or the human genome in biology. He also seems dismissive of human-focussed neuroimaging, instead in favour of simpler model organisms, which seems to undermine the significant efforts and contributions of this field. 

Ultimately, The Idea of the Brain underscores the brain’s elusiveness. While neuroscience has made extraordinary strides, Cobb highlights how the brain’s complexity continues to defy neat scientific explanation - despite the efforts or metaphors and ambitious research endeavours. I was left in awe of how much we have learned about the brain, and yet still how little we know, wondering - what really is our idea of it? 

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This article was written by Carly Hood and edited by Rebecca Pope, with graphics produced by Suzana Sultan. If you enjoyed this article, be the first to be notified about new posts by signing up to become a WiNUK member (top right of this page)! Interested in writing for WiNUK yourself? Contact us through the blog page and the editors will be in touch.