Rafael Yuste, a Spaniard, in the Columbia University in New York City From the programme that is studying the brain in the US, they have given themselves ten years. So look at the simplifications that are working out there.
"It's a kind of exploratory research, like arriving on a new continent and seeing it for the first time. Many of the lessons we have learned and are still learning were unforeseeable only a short time ago. The whole brain is used even when we sleep and it only shuts down when the patient is in a coma and not completely. Spontaneous brain activity is one of the great mysteries of neuroscience: why do we spend so much energy on keeping it active all the time? Because the brain works in a multidimensional way.
"I guarantee that there are going to be new neurons that no one has described before and types of neurons that people have described before that are going to disappear. "We can't explain the most elementary thing, how the brain processes a thought, a notion, a sensation or an action. To do that, we will have to map the brain's networks and see how information is transmitted through those networks. This will require a lot of novel technologies and theories that we don't have now. We don't know how they connect to each other and we don't know how information is transmitted through those connected networks.
You may have noticed that a Spanish scientist, speaking on behalf of a large team, says that we don't know what an emotional process is. Do you realise how often we hear or read that, "experts in emotional intelligence? And even marketing based on how neurons work".
Gaps in human behaviour
Emotion, or rather feeling, the feeling of being comfortable, good, bad, angry, anxious, hurt. They are biological, bodily, glandular, sympathetic and parasympathetic states; therefore, mostly non-conscious.
If there are thousands of neuroscientists studying the brain, it will be because of its enormous complexity and the immense gaps in our knowledge. On the other hand, I insist once again that many technological researchers are increasingly ignorant of what culture, civilisation, the life of the Planet of which we are a component, of human behaviour, is, and that is why they are venturing into the simplistic technological future, putting very imaginative news about our brain in the media. They must be very encouraged by the fact that the media highlight all their news about the brain, emotions and motivation, without checking with specialists, and in this way they contribute to degrade the cultural environment. We are inundated with headlines.
José Antonio Rodríguez Piedrabuena
Specialist in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis