DESCARTES' ERROR Antonio Damasio Picador, $289 HERE you are, gentle reader, sitting (I trust) in a comfortable armchair, glass at hand, dog at feet, scrolling gently through a few printed syllables from me and bracing for an assault on the higher peaks of Cartesian philosophy. And what is happening? What is happening, I mean, in that mysterious area behind your eyes and between your ears. Damasio is not really bothered with Descartes - it is the inside of your head he is interested in.
In this matter, at least, you are still a man or woman of mystery. We know the brain consists largely of neurons, small hairy objects which can produce a tiny burst of electric current.
There are, though, several billion of them. The connections between them number about 10 trillion. The hairy connections have a total length measured in hundreds of thousands of miles.
The complexity of all this far exceeds the amount of design information your genes can carry, so in effect you design and build your own brain.
Each brain is unique, formed by its own upbringing and experiences. Some of these developments are deliberate - if you decide to learn the piano, for example, or your mother teaches you to read - but most of them just happen. So this is unavoidably a rather mysterious implement.
Until recently you could not even look at one unless it had first been switched off, with fatal consequences for the user. At the same time the brain is of compelling interest. We all know, think and feel.