Future of the Mind 
which range up to 1,000 per second, are likely to have any 
influence at all on protein synthesis. 
We must expect explosive changes in our understanding when 
we begin to understand the brain. Its machinery is complicated 
to an extent which is difficult to realize, since we are brought up 
to think about the brain in terms of rather simple reflex pat- 
terns. We imagine that the system is one in which we press a 
button and the model works. We escape by saying we don’t 
know how the cortex functions and leave it at that. But as we 
begin to have ways of thinking about what happens in higher 
nervous centres it is very likely that our whole basic system of 
thought will be revolutionized in a manner that is perhaps not 
yet realized. 
The particular aspect I want to stress is that the brain learns 
by setting up a model of the world, and it builds this model out 
of units with which it is probably pre-endowed by heredity. 
The components out of which the learning system builds this 
model of the world must be in the brain. This is a form of 
representation, and it is produced by selecting certain items 
from a pre-set alphabet and transmitting the information in 
terms of this selection from the code. If we get to know some- 
thing about this alphabet, which I think is embodied to some 
extent in the shapes of the cells in the brain, we should begin 
to have an entirely new language for talking about, for example, 
form perception. We should understand a great deal more 
about how we recognize shapes, how we read, how we teach 
children to read, how we see ourselves, shapes, faces and people. 
We at present understand only very little about this coding 
system. Physiological experiments in which recordings are made 
from single cortical cells tell us that a lot of our visual pattern 
is made up of oval fields assembled in the cortex by the learning 
process. What is this learning process? The setting up of 
representation out of a set of symbols involves selection. Some 
symbols are accepted, others rejected. I suggest that the whole 
system is basically concerned with limiting the number of 
possible things that each cell can do, by a choice between per- 
haps only two outputs of each cell. Each cell begins with 
11* 323 
