James Le Fanu, a medical doctor and science journalist, describes an interesting puzzle associated with how the brain works. in a forward to the book Restoration of Man, Le Fanu writes that the simplest of stimuli like the words chair or sit cause vast tracts of the brain to "light up" which prompts "a sense of bafflement at what the most mundane conversation must entail."
The sights and sounds of every transient moment are fragmented into "myriad separate components without the slightest hint of the integrating mechanism" that ties them all together into a coherent, unified experience of the world.
Le Fanu quotes Nobel Prize-winner David Hubel of Harvard who observes that, "The abiding tendency for attributes such as form, color and movement to be handled by separate structures in the brain immediately raises the question how all the information is finally assembled, say, for perceiving a bouncing red ball. They obviously must be assembled - but where and how we have no idea."
It is an astonishing thing. Consider how much the brain must organize in order, for example, for a batter to hit a baseball. The brain must calculate the velocity and trajectory of the ball and initiate and coordinate all the movements of the various parts of the body necessary to execute the swing, and do it all within a fraction of a second.
If all of these functions are being carried out in different regions of the brain how are they integrated so precisely that the ball is successfully struck? What structure or mechanism carries out the integration function?
That question leads to others. Is there more to our mental experience than can be accounted for by the material organ called the brain? Do we also have an immaterial mind? If we knew all the physical facts about how the brain works would our knowledge be complete or would there still be something non-physical left over? How did random, purposeless genetic accidents produce an organ with such amazing capabilities?
A Nobel Prize is waiting for anyone who discovers the answers to any of these questions and can empirically demonstrate the truth of the answers beyond reasonable doubt.
