As followers of natural science we know nothing of any relation between thoughts and the brain, except as a gross correlation in time and space.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the limitation of our understanding of the relationship between thoughts and brain activity.
In this quote, Charles Scott Sherrington emphasizes that while we observe correlations between thoughts and brain functions in terms of timing and spatial location, our comprehension of the underlying relationship remains rudimentary. This acknowledgment of the gaps in knowledge underscores the complexity of the mind-brain connection and encourages further inquiry into the intricacies of consciousness and cognition within the realm of natural science.
In practice
In a lecture discussing the philosophy of mind, this quote can illustrate the complexity of understanding human thought.
The brain seems a thoroughfare for nerve-action passing its way to the motor animal. It has been remarked that Life's aim is an act not a thought. To-day the dictum must be modified to admit that, often, to refrain from an act is no less an act than to commit one, because inhibition is coequally with excitation a nervous activity.
You look at science fiction and look how often it talks about being alien, being alienated about the other. Look at the number of blue people - 'Avatar,' I'm looking at you. And it is now easier to find people of color in science-fiction literature and media, but the issues of representation are still really, really troubling.
Statistics is the grammar of science.
It was strange, in a way, because there were no ideas involved in the laser that weren't already known by somebody 25 years before lasers were discovered. The ideas were all there; just, nobody put it together.
I conclude that, while it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.
The mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transformation of a mineral species.
It is this potential for plasticity of the relatively stereotyped units of the nervous system that endows each of us with our individuality.
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