ABSTRACT
It will be obvious from this book that the brain which guides our lives is fiendishly complex. Although substantial progress has been made in understanding some parts of the brain as one layer of complexity is penetrated another is revealed which prevents an overall understanding of its function. How we think, memorize a poem, do a sum, read or write a letter, is nowhere near understood in terms of brain function. To add a final complicating observation or two; it seems that some neuronal machinery (the synapse ?), as chapter 10 indicated, makes us retain all that rivets our attention as a ‘memory trace’. Amazingly all this goes on against a much larger ‘background’ activity of neurones which has nothing to do with the specific memory. Moruzzi1 puzzling over this over twenty years ago concluded that, ‘all these considerations lead to the conclusion that the neural processes underlying learning and forgetting, storage and retrieval of memory traces are quantitatively small with respect to the background activity of the cerebrum, although the highest achievements of mankind, from artistic creation to scientific discovery, are dependent upon them’.
