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Editorial
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Recent issues of Brain contain several original articles describing the role of the brain as the organ of decision. How external stimuli are sifted and orchestrated into actions and behaviours that advantage us as individuals and members of society—motivated by enlightened self-interest or uncomplicated altruism—lifts the study of brain and behaviour above the mere nuts and bolts of microcircuits and how they sense and respond with knee-jerk predictability. In ‘Mind as Machine’ Stephen Jacyna reviews Margaret Boden's weighty history of cognitive science, of which over 1000 pages (but still only around 60% of the book) are devoted to the story of mind as nothing more than the product of brain functions that are, in turn, irrevocably yoked to structure (page 2526).
The problem, if that is one's perspective, starts with that astonishing decade, the 1660s, when the brain came out of the skull and the question could be asked: ‘is
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