ABSTRACT
In one of Moliere's plays a doctor, on being asked why opium made one sleepy, explained earnestly that the opium worked by means of its 'dormitive potency'. Despite this subterfuge several hundred years ago, the rather similar process of mapping descriptions or categories of behaviour on to regions of the brain (e.g. sleep is controlled by a sleep centre) seems widely accepted today. So does the notion that to see an object, say a potato, we consign the retinal image pattern of that potato to the response class of potatoes. Maybe the idea that, if we know the name of some thing, or some process, or some person, we have power over them runs deep.
