Page 190 - Visions of the Future Chemistry and Life Science

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Reverse engineering the human mind

Dept of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road,
Oxford OX1 3UD, UK

Reverse engineering: ‘The process of analysing an existing system to iden-
tify its components and their interrelationships and create representa-
tions of the system in another form or at a higher level of abstraction’.
On-line dictionary of computing.

In a letter to the Danish physicist Hans Oersted (1777–1851) in 1850
Michael Faraday remarked that, concerning scientific discoveries, ‘we
have little idea at present of the importance they may have ten or twenty
years hence’. It is of course a view with which no research scientist will
disagree but even Faraday may have been surprised at the life span and
biography of one his most widely known discoveries. In 1831 Faraday dem-
onstrated that a moving magnetic field could induce an electric current in
a nearby circuit, a discovery he believed ‘may probably have great influence
in some of the most important effects of electric currents’. At the time of
this discovery it was already known from Luigi Galvani’s (1737–1798)
experiments, showing that electrical currents could produce muscle
contractions, that nervous tissue had something to do with electricity; and
in 1838 Carlo Matteucci (1811–1868) had introduced the term ‘muscle
current’ to describe the activity of muscle tissue previously referred to as
‘animal electricity’. Ten years later Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896)
demonstrated a direct relationship between electric current and nerve cell
activity. Even so, it took until 1939 and the work of Alan Hodgkin
and Andrew Huxley to show that brain activity depends upon electrical
activity: the brain, then, is a machine that runs on electricity.

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