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.
The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero.
What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space.
It is to them [fossils] alone that we owe the commencement of even a Theory of the Earth ... By them we are enabled to ascertain, with the utmost certainty, that our earth has not always been covered over by the same external crust, because we are thoroughly assured that the organized bodies to which these fossil remains belong must have lived upon the surface before they came to be buried, as they now are, at a great depth.
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
It is on record that when a young aspirant asked Faraday the secret of his success as a scientific investigator, he replied, 'The secret is comprised in three words- Work, Finish, Publish.'
We live on a minute island of known things. Our undiminished wonder at the mystery which surrounds us is what makes us human. In science fiction we can approach that mystery, not in small, everyday symbols, but in bigger ones of space and time.
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