%0 Journal Article
%T Brain Theory
%A Dmitri Krioukov
%J Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience
%D 2014
%I Frontiers Media
%R 10.3389/fncom.2014.00114
%X Inspired by the BRAIN initiative, a quickly growing body of brightest minds worldwide are set to understand how the brain works. How soon should we expect them to achieve this goal? Is this goal achievable at all? And how wide is the consensus on what the goal really is? It is difficult to expect any agreement on an answer, if there is no agreement on the question. The interpretation of the question varies dramatically from one research group to another and even within a single group. Quite naturally, everyone seems to have his/her own opinion about what such a vague and elusive problem as "how the brain works" might mean. At one extreme are simplicists who do not see any problem at all. At the other extreme are metaphysicists dealing with the problem of consciousness, and how to "explain the feeling of the red" to a person blind at birth. Somewhere in between, perhaps closer to the former group, are those who believe that complete brain mapping at the neuron level will solve the problem. No one argues that it will indeed solve the problem of brain mapping at the neuron level. There seems to be no argument that it will not solve the problem of explaining the red to a blind either. Having the brain map handy may be a necessary but definitely not sufficient condition for understanding how the brain works. It seems obvious that knowing the structure is not enough. We also have to know the dynamics, and understand the laws that govern it. This state of things is not unique for understanding the brain. It is fairly typical for any dynamical system. The brain is somewhat atypical in that this dynamical system is very complex. And it is very atypical in that this complex system is being studied by itself. Here we avoid discussing the latter aspect any further, and comment on the former. It is difficult to name a field of science that made no contribution to studying complex dynamical systems. Biologists, physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists--all bring their own methods, knowledge, and intuition to advance our understanding of complex biological systems such as the brain. Yet compared to how physics advances at the Large Hadron Collider, for example, our understanding of biological system appears to advance more slowly and erratically. Why? The answer that may very well be correct is that the brain is more complex than the Higgs boson. But this answer misses the point. There is an impressive gap in how modern physics approaches "simple" and "complex" systems. For the "simplest systems," by which we mean the fundamental interactions in nature, we now
%K complex systems
%K complex networks
%K Bayesian brittleness
%K Modeling and simulations
%K Theoretical Physics
%U http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fncom.2014.00114/full