With its billions of interconnected neurons, whose interactions change from millisecond to millisecond, the human brain is an archetypal complex system.
Interpretation
The human brain is a highly intricate and dynamic system made up of countless interconnected neurons that continuously interact.
Miguel Nicolelis highlights the human brain's complexity by describing it as a system of billions of neurons that are in constant communication with each other. This intricate network allows for rapid changes and adaptations, illustrating not only the sophistication of our cognitive processes but also the dynamic nature of neural interactions that underpin our thoughts, behaviors, and experiences.
In practice
During a science presentation about the brain's functions, this quote can illustrate its complexity.
Even two of humanity's most intimate possessions - a sense of self and a body image - are fluid, highly modifiable creations of the brain's mischievous deployment of electricity and a handful of chemicals. They both can change or be changed on less than a second's notice.
It's the first time an exoskeleton has been controlled by brain activity and offered feedback to the patients. Doing a demonstration in a stadium is something very much outside our routine in robotics. It's never been done before.
We want to galvanize people's imaginations. With enough political will and investment, we could make wheelchairs obsolete.
We cannot even predict what kinds of emergent properties would appear when animals begin interacting as part of a brain-net. In theory, you could imagine that a combination of brains could provide solutions that individual brains cannot achieve by themselves.
We must never make experiments to confirm our ideas, but simply to control them.
My practise as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world. And I should be a coward if I did not state my theoretical views in public.
Science does not promise absolute truth, nor does it consider that such a thing necessarily exists. Science does not even promise that everything in the Universe is amenable to the scientific process.
I had as much time to prepare for that moon landing as NASA did, and I still was speechless when it happened. It just was so awe-inspiring to actually be able to see the thing through the television that was a miracle in itself.
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
Do not become archivists of facts. Try to penetrate to the secret of their occurrence, persistently search for the laws which govern them.
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