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But it's time to bring experience back. Neuroscience has effectively investigated the sound waves, but it has missed the music. Although reductionism has its uses -- it is, for instance, absolutely crucial for helping us develop new pharmaceutical treatments for mental illnesses -- its limitations are too significant to allow us to answer our biggest questions. As the novelist Richard Powers wrote, "If we knew the world only through synapses, how could we know the synapse?
Virginia Woolf, for example, famously declared that the task of the novelist is to "examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day ... [tracing] the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness."

In other words, she wanted to describe the mind from the inside, to distill the details of our psychological experience into prose. That's why her novels have endured: because they feel true. And they feel true because they capture a l

layer of reality that reductionism cannot. As Noam Chomsky said, "It is quite possible -- overwhelmingly probable, one might guess -- that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology." In this sense, the arts are an incredibly rich data set, providing neuroscience with a glimpse behind its blind spots."

Great clip!

Super, wonderful, brilliant.

Amazing how science begins to acknowledg the metapysical world, but have not even scratched the surface hardly.

It turns out that there is nothing inherently mysterious about those 3 pounds of wrinkled flesh inside the skull.

Quite, but then, if you'll allow me to advocate for the poet in us all:
Perhaps nothing is inherently mysterious, however! that should never prevent us from adoring, creating, de and re-constructing never ending mysterious stories about life, our life, other's lives, and how they all mysteriously interact with each other.

If a neuroscientist uses the phrase 3 pounds of wrinkled flesh to describe a brain, they usually mean someone else's brain. I remember when Isaac Newton thought he was pretty smart for showing how gravity worked. There turned out to be more to it. It was just a matter of looking in the right place.

Some things can seem simple. You get thirsty, you drink, but it can be difficult to describe how good a cool drink can be on a hot day. The neurological description of the brain, seems a bit like describing the Mona Lisa as 'Brightly colored canvas' with scientists trying to work out how da Vinci made his paint.

pokkets, great catch on: " If a neuroscientist uses the phrase 3 pounds of wrinkled flesh to describe a brain, they usually mean someone else's brain." I would also like to commend you on your long reaching memory

I remember when Isaac Newton thought he was pretty smart for showing how gravity worked.

I definitely agree with your comments, and the 'thirsty' example is delivering my point above - the mystery, the creativity, the uniqueness of experience, remain.