Abstract
Organs other than the central nervous system have functions that are fairly well understood. The heart is a pump, the lung a gas exchanger, the kidney a filter. These functions had to remain mysterious to Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen whose times lacked an accurate chemistry, but now most of the mysteries are gone. The brain, however, is still poorly understood, as poorly as the other organs before modern physics and chemistry. The brain’s functions are not physical or chemical but cybernetic. The brain is a sensing and control organ. The theoretical framework for its functions is computer science, a discipline that has had much less time to mature than physics and chemistry, and consequently is less well developed. Understanding the brain remains a profound challenge.
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Bremermann, H. (1974). Complexity of Automata, Brains, and Behavior. In: Conrad, M., GĂĽttinger, W., Dal Cin, M. (eds) Physics and Mathematics of the Nervous System. Lecture Notes in Biomathematics, vol 4. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-80885-2_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-80885-2_17
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