ABSTRACT
Whereas the twentieth century has been characterized in terms of biological achievement, culminating with the mapping of the human genome, the twenty-first century is forecast to be that of the brain. The understanding of this most complex of human organs is a daunting interdisciplinary project that includes, among others, evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists, researchers into cybernetics and artificial intelligence, philosophers and psychologists, social and cultural anthropologists, linguists and historians. Researchers from across this broad range of disciplines have already initiated major investigations into how our evolved genetic endowment expresses itself in the physiology of the brain and its various functional systems, the relationships and interactions of these systems, and the ways in which input from our environment is processed by these systems. Many of these researchers foresee that naturalistic explanations for the ways by which neurological structures and systems (brain) enable but also constrain our mental functions (mind) will be one of the outcomes of this research over the coming century. This prognosis of a material explanation for human cognition has been termed the identity of ‘brain’ and ‘mind’. In the meantime, cognitive scientists are contributing to this long-term task by focusing on the general properties, functions and organization of human cognition, including those associated with ‘religion’.
