The Bounded Brain: Toward Quantitative Neuroanatomy

An idea that human cognitive resources are virtually without limit turns up at all levels of mind/brain science, but this tacit unbounded-resource assumption has paradoxical consequences in neuroscience, particularly involving the quantitative incoherence of some key anatomical studies of cortical connectivity resources.

Abstract

An idea that human cognitive resources are virtually without limit turns up at all levels of mind/brain science. This tacit unbounded-resource assumption has paradoxical consequences in neuroscience, particularly involving the quantitative incoherence of some key anatomical studies of cortical connectivity resources: cortical sheet area, synaptic density there, and giant axonic arborizations in visual cortex. This inattention to quantitative consistency checking in neuroanatomy appears to stem from, as a notable instance, something of the nonspatial character of the Cartesian concept of mind being extended to the brain as physical structure.