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Brain Advance Access published online on March 4, 2008
Brain, doi:10.1093/brain/awn038
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Book Review

Thoughts of a Mathematician

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

How do we think? What is a thought? Are there many different kinds of thinking? How do our thoughts relate to the outside world? Such questions have been pondered over by philosophers for thousands of years. There are no real answers but the questions get clarified and we learn something in the process. The progress of modern neuroscience is now changing the picture and is beginning to shed light on this whole area. It is not unrealistic to expect that, by the end of the 21st century, our understanding of the human brain will mean that many of the old philosophical questions will simply have disappeared, rather in the way that no-one asks anymore ‘What is Life?’ Instead we have a new subject called molecular biology, encompassing DNA and the genetic code.

But meanwhile, as we head towards this goal, it is useful to formulate more precise questions concerning the . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Michael Atiyah

School of Mathematics
University of Edinburgh


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