You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Two centuries of research have yielded exponential gains in knowledge of the brain's diverse functions
and their anatomical substrates. By “reverse engineering,” neuropsychologists and neurophysiologists have attempted to separate out the components, or primitives, that underlie cognition, teasing out cell assemblies, or even individual neurons, to which they ascribe specific roles in cognitive processes. This “localizationist” approach originated from the thoroughly unfounded but heuristic assumptions of Franz Joseph Gall at the turn of the 18th century. Although phrenology postulated the wrong components in the wrong places, the idea that function is localized in the brain, once it was operationalized in the study of people with focal brain damage, has been thoroughly vindicated. The inventory of validated modular brain functions that is now available is so rich that it is tempting for cognitive scientists to suppose that only a small step remains to instantiate a functioning and experiencing brain: to “bind” the elements together, by as yet undiscovered means. I call this the assembly theory of brain function. It encourages the fantasy that one could simulate the human brain in artifacts, with the expectation that humans' subjective experience would emerge spontaneously from the robotic assembly of capabilities. The emphasis on capabilities derives from the understandable but exaggerated emphasis on the brain as an adaptive device. It is, but even more it is a self-regulating and self-sustaining, spontaneously generative organ. The adaptive role, though obvious and critical to its continued existence, is secondary.
Although assembly theory has dominated cognitive brain research since it began, dissenting voices have been heard throughout those two centuries. Hughlings Jackson, Henry Head, Paul Schilder, Karl Lashley, Kurt Goldstein, and Karl Pribram are brilliant advocates of a contrasting, holistic approach. Not that they doubted that functi