How Brains Seem to Work

Dale Purves

Only a few ideas about the overall operation of the brain have been seriously considered in recent decades, and all have relied heavily on studies of vision and the visual brain. The one that has come up often is that the brain extracts features from sensory stimuli and combines them in representations of the world in higher-order cortical areas that we then perceive and use to inform behavior and cognition. This perspective takes the brain to be directly related to the real world by logical operations carried out by neurons, neural circuits, and brain systems. The explicit or implicit advocacy of this essentially rationalist interpretation of brains has focused on both the biology of neural processing and ...