ABSTRACT
After these groundbreaking insights had been made, serious research on the human brain was finally poised to take off. A number of major developments occurred during the first half of the 20th century, and then the pace of progress accelerated dramatically, one might even say meteorically, during the second half. Most importantly, during the 1970s and 1980s, not only did neuroscientists begin to forge productive interdisciplinary collaborations with scholars in the closely related fields of psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence, but they also gained access to several new techniques for measuring both the structure and the function of the brain with unprecedented precision. These advances generated a wealth of exciting new findings with far-reaching theoretical and clinical implications, and to stimulate further investigation and promote public awareness, U.S. president George H. W. Bush officially declared the 1990s to be the “Decade of the Brain.” Since then, our understanding of how the brain creates the mind has continued to deepen, and today it is common knowledge that although the fragile organ lodged inside our skulls may appear to be just a messy glob of goo, it is actually the most complex computational device in the known universe.
