No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven\u2019s 5th Symphony in the brain \u2013 or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn\u2019t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does \u2013 not even simple things such as \u2018memories\u2019.<\/p>\n
Our shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused. For more than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and other experts on human behaviour have been asserting that the human brain works like a computer.<\/p>\n
To see how vacuous this idea is, consider the brains of babies. Thanks to evolution, human neonates, like the newborns of all other mammalian species, enter the world prepared to interact with it effectively. A baby\u2019s vision is blurry, but it pays special attention to faces, and is quickly able to identify its mother\u2019s. It prefers the sound of voices to non-speech sounds, and can distinguish one basic speech sound from another. We are, without doubt, built to make social connections.<\/p>\n