Similarly, when you lose yourconsciousness, when you go to sleep at night or when you're anesthetized, youdon't really think that you're really going to be losing your mind.

Similarly, when you lose yourconsciousness, when you go to sleep at night or when you're anesthetized, youdon't really think that you're really going to be losing your mind.

I often wonder whether real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitized and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf… Perhaps future generations will recoil with similar horror at the messiness, unpredictability and immediate personal involvement of a three-dimensional, real-time interaction.

The question of how the ebb and flow of a highly developed mind can be catered to by a physical brain, and the related question of how the one impacts the other, are the hardest-ever challenges to human ingenuity and imagination.

The most obvious feature of the brain is that it is not homogeneous, but composed of different regions. There are no intrinsic moving parts, no obvious way of knowing where to start to understand what is actually happening, or what functions are taking place.