Nautilus

Here's Why Most Neuroscientists Are Wrong About the Brain

Most neuroscientists believe that the brain learns by rewiring itself—by changing the strength of connections between brain cells, or neurons. But experimental results published last year, from a lab at Lund University in Sweden, hint that we need to change our approach. They suggest the brain learns in a way more analogous to that of a computer: It encodes information into molecules inside neurons and reads out that information for use in computational operations.

Gary Waters/Getty Images

With a computer scientist, Adam King, I co-authored a book, We argued that well-established results in cognitive science and computer science imply that computation in the brain must resemble computation in a computer in

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