We're just starting to unlock the secrets of the brain, but for all those hoping that this is the one that does it, I will take the risk of saying "It won't happen this time".

We don't know what the information transfer mechanisms are in the brain, nor do we know how information is stored. We do know that action potentials are the observable and recordable signs of potential brain activity, but that's all we can see. If you have something as complicated [1] as the brain, assuming that one of the first things we found about the brain is the way it lets me think of art, reason about the past, and adapt to my surroundings is plain stupid.

Since we discovered neurons [2], there have been monumental changes in how we understand the world. But this still isn't enough. We cannot explain the things that happen in brains with our current understanding of physics. Minds are more connected than one may initially assume.

I'll tell you a story about why I know this to be true, and what it means for our attempts to recreate a brain.

For as long as I can remember, I have been falling asleep with some sort of music or movie playing.

Whenever I would drift off to sleep, I would hear this noise in the background. It let me sleep easily, giving me something to focus on. When I went to Norway this past summer, I didn't have anything to listen to, only my mind.

I noticed when I was about to fall asleep, something weird would happen. I would hear things that weren't thoughts I had, they were thoughts in other languages. They sounded like what I was hearing in Norway, but they could have been Chinese for all I know, but what I do know is that they were sounds I never recognized, and they were in languages that weren't my own.

Whose thoughts were these, and why were they in my brain when I was falling asleep? Weird things happen when we sleep, but before all contact from the real world shuts off, the transition into sleep may be one of the most important for figuring out what is really happening in our brains.

How would this information transfer boundaries between my brain and another person's brain, or another region in space time? This would be easy to pass off as misinterpreted noise, but this happened for many times while in Norway, but when I got back home, it tapered off (I lost my peace of mind when I returned home).

Our current understanding of physics is not advanced enough to allow us to understand the brain. We have done cool things with technology, but I think we are farther from understanding what is a person is in the true sense of the question. It's interesting to think about the 'hard problems' that persist over life times. Almost all the problems that we are solving today are not 'hard problems'. They are challenging, fulfilling, rewarding, and helpful in the short term.

I once went for a long bike ride, and it had been a while so I was pretty excited. I told my dad about my achievement. I said "Dad, I went for a 50 mile bike ride today!". He said "Yeah, but did you get anywhere?".

We are solving problems, but the solutions are not advancing the human race. We are riding around in a circle.

I'll stop now, and hopefully start a blog so I can put out my long winded rants there.

[1] http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n17/history/neurons2_i.htm