Mind and Body

"This is an obscure reference that most neuroscientists or philosophers will not be familiar with. But it is historically a very important book because Bain is probably the first connectionist. By that I mean the doctrine of connectionism that you have been alluding to, which is that the connections of the brain are extremely important for its functioning. As far as I can tell, he was the first person to propose that you learn things when your connections change. It’s amazing that he proposed that [in 1872], even before neurons were really discovered. He also came up with the first theory of neurocoding, or how the activity of neurons encodes your perceptions or thoughts. “There is a long tradition of studying the brains of geniuses, especially in the 19th century.” He said that there are two ways to do this. One is the idea that out of a huge number of neurons there are some subsets that are active at any given point in time, and that these subsets are a kind of code. Then he proposed that the active neurons might be more or less active, so that is an additional way in which information is encoded. It’s a principle which is still used today. Yes, and he came up with these ideas purely by thinking about it. He’s on the boundary line between two ideas. Connectionism is the successor to associationism. Associationism is the doctrine that enables us to understand all psychology – it’s the idea of association between ideas. People like the philosopher John Locke were associationist philosophers. Connectionism can be viewed as assigning material sub-streams to associations. Somehow, the associations between ideas are represented by the connections between neurons. And Bain was the first person to express that idea."