Brains, Past and Future

By sheer coincidence (or some journalistic twist of fate) two magazine articles of mine are coming out this week, and they just so happen to make a nice neurological pairing. In Science, I've written an essay about what seventeenth-century natural philosophers have to teach twenty-first century neuroscientists about the brain. In the February issue of Popular Science, my cover story looks at the latest work on brain-machine interfaces that will let people control machines with thought alone. Inevitably, the Pop Sci piece can only focus on a time scale of a few years. But the latest brain-machine interfaces seem to me to be the ultimate incarnation of the dreams of the scientific revolution. Before the 1600s, the world was filled with souls and soul-like forces. In addition to the immortal human soul, there were souls in our organs, in plants, in stars. Water rose in a straw because it abhorred ...