ABSTRACT
Whereas the twentieth century has been characterized in terms of biological achievements, culminating with the mapping of the human genome, the twenty-first century is forecast as that of the brain and its relationship to cognition. The understanding of this most complex of human organs and an explanation for its mental functions is a daunting interdisciplinary project that includes evolutionary biologists and psychologists, computer scientists and neuroscientists, linguists and philosophers, researchers into cybernetics and artificial intelligence, as well as social and cultural anthropologists, historians and ethnographers. 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, in its various specialized systems, and in the relationships and interactions of these systems. They are also exploring internal (hormonal and chemical) effects upon these systems as well as the external import of our environment. These researchers anticipate that a comprehensive explanation of our neurological structures and their functions, and how they enable but also constrain our cognitive processes, will be one of the outcomes of this research over the coming century. And they anticipate that this explanation for the workings of our brain will be based solely upon material conditions – including, perhaps, a naturalistic explanation for consciousness itself. This predicted material explanation for mental functions has been termed the identity of ‘brain’ and ‘mind’. In the meantime, cognitive scientists are contributing to this longterm task by focusing on the general properties, organization and functions of human cognition, including those associated with ‘religion’.
